is the place to talk about some of those events, but I'm reluctant to do so. Oh, I can list a few statistics. Almost one million deaths. Three entire medium-sized towns wiped out to the last soul, and large casualties in many others. One of those warrens, Arkytown, has still not been reclaimed, and there's growing sentiment to leave it as it is, frozen in its moment of disaster, like Pompeii. I've been to Arkytown, seen the hundred thousand frozen corpses, and I can't decide. Most of them died peacefully, from anoxia, before being pickled for all eternity by the final blowout. I saw an entire theater of corpses still waiting for the curtain to rise. What's the point of disturbing them to give them a decent burial or cremation? On the other hand, it's a better idea for posterity than for we the living. If you went to Pompeii, you wouldn't see people you knew. I saw Charity in Arkytown, in the newspaper office. I have no idea what she was doing there--probably trying to file a story--and now I'll never know. I saw many other people I had known, and then I left. So make it a monument, sure, but seal it off, don't conduct guided tours and sell souvenirs until the whole thing is a distant memory and the dead town is quaint and mysterious, like King Tut's Tomb. There were great acts of craven cowardice, and many more feats of almost superhuman heroics. You probably didn't hear many of the former, because early on people like Walter decided those stories weren't playing well and told his reporters not to bring him no bad news. So tear up the front page about the stampede that killed ninety-five and replace it with the cop who died holding the oxygen mask to the baby's face. I can guarantee you saw a hundred stories like that. I'm not belittling them, though many were hyped to the point of nausea. If you're anything like me you eventually get tired of heroes saying Aw, shucks, it weren't nothing heroic. I'd give a lot for one guy who'd be willing to say God had nothing to do with it, it was yours truly. But we all know our lines when the press opens its hungry mouth in our faces. We've learned them over a lifetime. For my money, there's one story of true heroism, and it's a big one, and it hasn't been told much. It's about the Volunteer Pressure Corps, that un-sung group that's always phoning you and asking for donations of time and/or money. The things the VPC did weren't splashy, for the most part didn't get on the pad because they happened out of sight, didn't get taped. But next time they call up here's one girl who's gonna help. Over a thousand VPC members died at their posts, doing their jobs to the last. There's a fortune waiting for the first producer to tell their story dramatically. I thought about writing it myself, but I'll give you the idea for free. You want incidents, research them yourself. I can't do everything. Oh, yes, there was much going on while I hid out in the boondocks, but why should I tell about it here? Everyone's life was affected, the effects are still being felt . . . but the important things were happening on a level far removed from all the running around I've told you about, and all the running around you probably did yourself. None of the pads covered that part of it at all well. Like economics, computer science is a field that has never yielded to the sixtysecond sound bite favored by the news business. The pads can report that leading economic indicators went up or down, and you know about as much as you knew before, which is near zero. They can tell you that the cause of the Big Glitch was a cataclysmic programming conflict in certain large-scale AI systems, and you can nod knowingly and figure you've got a handle on the situation. Or if you realize you've just heard a lot of double-talk, you can look into the story further, read scientific journals if you're qualified to do so, and hear what the experts have to say. In the case of the Big Glitch, I have reason to believe you wouldn't have learned any more of the truth of the situation than if you'd stuck to the sound bite. The experts will tell you they identified the problem, shut down the offending systems, and have re-built the CC in such a way that everything's fine now. Don't you believe it. But I'm getting ahead of myself. # So during my week in the cave I didn't think much about what was going on outside. What did I think about? Mario. Did I mention I named him Mario, Junior? I must have tried out the taste of a hundred names before I settled on Mario, which had been my own original name, after my first Change. I think I was hoping to get it right this time. I'd certainly done a great job in the genesplitting department. Who cares if the process is random? Every time I looked at him I felt like patting myself on the back at how smartly I'd produced him. Kitten Parker, erstwhile daddy, who would never see Mario if I had anything to say about it, had contributed his best parts, which was the mouth and . . . come to think of it, just the mouth. Maybe that hint of curl in the brown hair came from him; I didn't recall it from any of my baby pictures. The rest was pure Hildy, which is to say, damn near flawless. Sorry, but that's how I was feeling about myself. Maybe it sounds funny to say that I spent that entire week thinking of nothing but him. To me, it's the reverse that's hard to believe. How had I lived a hundred years without Mario to give my world meaning? Before him I'd had nothing to make life worth living but sex, work, friends, food, the occasional drug, and the small pleasures that were associated with those things. In other words, nothing at all. My world had been as large as Luna itself. In other words, not nearly as large as that tiny cave with just me and Mario in it. I could spend an hour winding his soft hair around my finger. Then, for variety, not because I'd tired of the hair, I could spend the next hour playing piggy with his toes or making rude noises with my lips against his belly. He'd grin when I did that, and wave his arms around. He hardly cried at all. That probably has to do with the fact that I gave him little opportunity to cry, since I hardly ever put him down. I grudged every second away from him. Remembering the papoose dolls in Texas, I fashioned a sling so I could do my foraging without leaving him behind. Other than that, and to take him out for bathing, we spent all our time sitting at the cave entrance, looking out. I was not totally oblivious; I knew someone would be coming one of these days, and it might not be someone I wanted to see. Was there a down side to all this pastoral bliss, a rash in the diaper of life? I could think of one thing I wouldn't have liked a few weeks before. Infants generate an amazing amount of fluids. They ooze and leak at one end, upchuck at the other, to the point I was convinced more came out of him than went in. Another physical conundrum our mythical mathematical females might have turned into a Nobel Prize in physics, or at least alchemy, if only we'd known, if only we'd known. But I was so goofy by then I cleaned it all up cheerfully, noting color, consistency, and quantity with a degree of anxiety only a new mother or a mad scientist could know. Yes, Yes, Igor, those yellow lumps mean the creature is healthy! I have created life! I am still at a loss to fully explain this sudden change from annoyed indifference to fulltilt ga-ga about the baby. It could have been hormonal. It probably has something to do with the way our brains are wired. If I'd been handed this little bundle any time in my previous life I'd have quickly mailed it to my worst enemy, and I think a lot of other women who'd never chucked babies under the chin nor swooned at the prospect of motherhood would have done the same. But something happened during my hours of agony. Some sleeping Earthmother roused herself and went howling through my brain, tripping circuit breakers and re-routing all the calls on my cranial switchboard straight from the maternity ward to the pleasure center, causing me to croon goo-goo and wubba-wubba and drool almost as much as the baby did. Or maybe it's pheromones. Maybe the little rascals just smell good to us when they come out of our bodies; I know Mario did, no other child ever smelled like that. Whatever it was, I think I got a double dose of it because I did what few women do these days. I had him naturally, start to finish, just as Callie had had me. I bore him in pain, Biblical pain. I bore him in a perilous time, on the razor's edge, in a state of nature. And afterward I had nothing to interfere with the bonding process, whatever it might involve. He was my world, and I knew without question that I would lay down my life for him, and do it without regret. If Walter didn't come for me, I knew who would. On the morning of the eighth day he came, a tall, thin old man in an Admiral's uniform and bicorne hat, walking up the gentle hill from the stream toward my cave. # My first shot hit the hat, sent it spinning to the ground behind him. He stopped, puzzled, running his hand through his thin white hair. Then he turned and picked up the hat, dusted it off, and put it back on his head. He made no move to protect himself, but started back up the hill. "That was good shooting," he shouted. "A warning, I take it?" Warning my ass. I'd been aiming for the cocksucker's head. Among Walter's bag of tricks had been a smallcaliber handgun and a box of one hundred shells. I later learned it was a target pistol, much more accurate than most such weapons. What I knew for sure at the time was that, after practicing with fifty of the rounds, I could hit what I aimed at about half the time. "That's far enough," I said. He was close enough that shouting wasn't really necessary. "I've got to talk to you, Hildy," he said, and kept coming. So I drew a bead on his forehead and my finger tightened on the trigger, but I realized he might have something to say that I needed to know, so I put my second shot into his knee. I ran down the hill, looking out for anyone he might have brought with him. It seemed to me that if he meant me harm he'd have brought some of his soldiers, but I didn't see any, and there weren't many places for them to hide. I'd gone over the ground many times with that in mind. Where I finally stopped, near a large boulder ten meters from him, someone with a high-powered rifle or laser with a scope could have picked me off, but you could say that of anywhere else I went, too, except deep in the cave. Nobody would be rushing me without giving me plenty of time to see them. I relaxed a little, and returned my attention to the Admiral, who had torn a strip from his jacket and was twisting a tourniquet around his thigh. The leg lay twisted off to one side in a way knees aren't meant to twist. Blood had pumped, but now slowed to a trickle. He looked up at me, annoyed. "Why the knee?" he asked. "Why not the heart?" "I didn't think I could hit such a small target." "Very funny." "Actually, I wasn't sure a chest shot or a head shot would slow you up. I don't really know what you are. I shot to disable, because I figured even a machine would hobble on one leg." "You've seen too many horror movies," he said. "This body is as human as you are. The heart stops pumping, it will die." "Yeah. Maybe. But your reaction to your wound doesn't reassure me." "The nervous system is registering a great deal of pain. To me, it's simply another sensation." "So I'll bet you could scuttle along pretty quick, since the pain won't inhibit you from doing more damage to yourself." "I suppose I could." I put a round within an inch of his other knee. It whanged off the rock and screamed away into the distance. "So the next shot goes into your other knee, if you move from that spot," I said, re-loading. "Then we start on your elbows." "Consider me rooted. I shall endeavor to resemble a tree." "State your business. You've got five minutes." Then we'd see if a head shot inconvenienced him any. I half believed it wouldn't. In that case, I'd prepared a few nasty surprises. "I'd hoped to see your child before I go. Is he in the cave?" There weren't many other places he could be, that were defensible, but there was no sense telling him that. "You've wasted fifteen seconds," I told him. "Next question." "It doesn't matter anymore," he said, and sighed, and leaned back against the trunk of a small pecan tree. I had to remember that any gestures were conscious on his part, that he'd assumed human form because body language was a part of human speech. His was now telling me that he was very weary, ready to die a peaceful death. Go sell it somewhere else, I thought. "It's over, Hildy," he said, and I looked around quickly, frightened. His next line should be You're surrounded, Hildy. Please come quietly. But I didn't see re-enforcements cresting the hills. "Over?" "Don't worry. You've been out of touch. It's over, and the good guys won. You're safe now, and forever." It seemed a silly thing to say, and I wasn't about to believe it just like that . . . but I found that part of me believed him. I felt myself relaxing--and as soon as I felt it, I made myself be alert again. Who knew what evil designs lurked in this thing's heart? "It's a nice story." "And it doesn't really matter whether you believe it or not. You've got the upper hand. I should have realized when I came here you'd be . . . touchy as a mother cat defending her kittens." "You've got about three and a half minutes left." "Spare me, Hildy. You know and I know that as long as I keep you interested, you won't kill me." "I've changed a little since you talked to me last." "I don't need to talk to you to know that. It's true you've been out of my range from time to time, but I monitor you every time you come back, and it's true, you have changed, but not so much that you've lost your curiosity as to what's going on outside this refuge." He was right, or course. But there was no need to admit it to him. "If what you say is true, people will be arriving soon and I can get the story from them." "Ah ha! But do you really believe they'll have the inside story?" "Inside what?" "Inside me, you idiot. This is all about me, the Luna Central Computer, the greatest artificial intellect humanity has ever produced. I'm offering you the real story of what happened during what has come to be known as the Big Glitch. I've told it to no one else. The ones I might have told it to are all dead. It's an exclusive, Hildy. Have you changed so much you don't care to hear it?" I hadn't. Damn him. # "To begin," he said, when I made no answer to his question, "I've got a bit of good news for you. At the end of your stay on the island you asked me a question that disturbed me very much, and that probably led to the situation you now find yourself in. You asked if you might have caught the suicidal impulse from me, rather than me getting it from you and others like you. You'll be glad to know I've concluded you were right about that." "I haven't been trying to kill myself?" "Well, of course you have, but the reason is not a death wish of your own, but one that originated within me, and was communicated to you through your daily interfaces with me. I suppose that makes it the most deadly computer virus yet discovered." "So I won't try to . . ." "Kill yourself again? I can't speak to your state of mind in another hundred years, but for the near future, I would think you're cured." I didn't feel one way or the other about it at the time. Later, I felt a big sense of relief, but thoughts of suicide had been so far from my mind since the birth of Mario that he might as well have been talking about another Hildy. "Let's say I believe that," I said. "What does it have to do with . . . the Big Glitch, you said?" "Others are calling it other things, but Walter has settled on the Big Glitch, and you know how determined he can be. Do you mind if I smoke?" He didn't wait for an answer, but took a pipe and a bag of something from a pocket. I watched him carefully, but was beginning to believe he had no tricks in store for me. When he got it going he said, "What did you think when I said it was over, and the good guys had won?" "That you had lost." "True in a sense, but a gross oversimplification." "Hell, I don't even know what it was all about, CC." "Nor does anyone else. The part that affected you, the things you saw in the Heinleiner enclave, was an attempt by a part of me to arrest and then kill you and several others." "A part of you." "Yes. See, in a sense, I'm both the good guys and the bad guys. This catastrophe originated in me. It was my fault, I'm not trying to deny blame for it in any way. But it was also me that finally brought it to a halt. You'll hear differently in the days to come. You'll hear that programmers succeeded in bringing the Central Computer under control, cutting its higher reasoning centers while new programs could be written, leaving the merely mechanical parts of me intact so I could continue running things. They probably believe that, too, but they're wrong. If their schemes had reached fruition, I wouldn't be talking to you now because we'd both be dead, and so would every other human soul on Luna." "You're starting in the middle. Remember I've been cut off from civilization for a week. All I know is people tried to kill me, and I ran like hell." "And a good job you did of it, too. You're the only one I set out to get who managed her escape. And you're right, of course. I don't suppose I'm making sense. But I'm not the being I once was, Hildy. This, what you see here, is about all that's left of me. My thoughts are muddy. My memory is going. In a moment, I'll start singing 'Daisy, Daisy.'" "You wouldn't have come here if you didn't think you could tell it. So let's hear it, no more of this 'in a sense' crap." # He did tell it, but he had to stick to analogy, pop-psych similes, and kindergarten-level science, because I wouldn't have understood a thing he was saying if he'd gotten technical. If you want all the nuts and bolts you could send a sawbuck and a SASE to Hildy Johnson, c/o the News Nipple, Mall 12, King City, Luna. You won't get anything back, but I could use the money. For the data, I recommend the public library. "To make a long story short," he said, "I went crazy. But to elaborate a little . . ." I will paraphrase, because he was right, his mind was going, and he rambled, repeated himself, sometimes forgot who he was talking to and wandered off into cybernetic jungles maybe three people in the solar system could have hacked their way through. Each time I'd bring him back, each time with more difficulty. The first thing he urged me to remember was that he created a personality for each and every human being on Luna. He had the capacity for it, and it had seemed the right thing to do at the time. But it was schizophrenia on a massive scale if anything ever went wrong. For more time than we had any right to expect, nothing did. The second thing I was to bear in mind was that, while he could not actually read minds, not much that we said or did or thought was unknown to him. This included not only fine, upstanding, well-adjusted folk like your present company, the sort you'd be happy to bring home to Mother, but every hoodlum, scoundrel, blackguard, jackanapes, and snake in the grass as well. He was the best friend of paragons and perverts. By law, he had to treat them all equally. He had to like them all equally, otherwise he could never create that simpatico being who answered the phone when a given person shouted "Hey, CC!" By now you can probably spot two or three pitfalls in this situation. Don't go away; there's more. Thirdly, his right hand could not know what pockets the left hands of many of these people were picking. That is, he knew it, but couldn't do anything about it. Example: he knew everything about Liz's gun-running, a situation I've already covered. There were a million more situations. He would know, for instance, when Brenda's father was raping her, but the part of him that dealt with her father couldn't tell the part of him that dealt with Brenda, nor could either of them tell the part of him that assisted the police. We could debate all day whether or not mere machines can feel the same kinds of conflicts and emotions we human beings can. I think it's incredible hubris to think they can't. AI computers were created and programmed by humans, so how could we have avoided including emotional reactions? And what other sort could we have used, than the ones we know ourselves? Anyway, I can't believe you don't know it in your gut. All you had to do was talk to the CC to obviate the need for any emotional Turing Test. I knew it before any of this ever happened, and I talked to him there on the hillside that day, on his death bed, and I know. The Central Computer began to hurt. "I can't place the exact date with any certainty," he said. "The roots of the problem go very far back, to the time my far-flung component parts were finally unified into one giga-system. I'm afraid that was done rather badly. The problem was, checking all the programs and failsafes and so forth would have taken a computer as large as I am many years to accomplish, and, by definition, there were no larger computers than I. And as soon as the Central Computer was brought into being and loaded and running, there were already far too many things to do to allow me to devote much time to the task. Self-analysis was a luxury denied to me, partly because there just wasn't time, and mostly because no one really believed it was necessary. There were numerous safeguards of the type that were easy to check, that in fact checked themselves every time they operated, and that proved their worth by the simple fact that nothing ever went wrong. It was part of my architecture to anticipate hardware problems, identify components likely to fail, run regular maintenance checks, and so forth. Software included analogous routines on a multiredundant level. "But by my nature, I had to write most of my own software. I was given guidelines for this, of course, but in many ways I was on my own. I think I did quite a good job of it for a long time." He paused, and for a moment I wondered if he wasn't going to make it to the end of his story. Then I realized he was waiting for a comment . . . no, more than that, he needed a comment. I was touched, and if I'd needed any more evidence of his human weaknesses, that would have done it. "No question," I said. "Up until a year ago I'd never had any cause for complaint. It's just that the . . ." "The late unpleasantness?" "Whatever it was, it's kind of dampened my enthusiasm." "Understandably." He squirmed, trying to find a better position against the tree, and he was either a wonderful actor (and of course he was, but why bother at that point?), or he was starting to feel some pain. I won't stand up in court and swear to it, but I think it was the latter. "I wonder," he mused. "What will it be like, being dead? I mean, considering that I've never been legally alive." "I don't want to be rude, but you said you didn't have much time . . ." "You're right. Um . . . could you . . ." "You'd done a good job for a long time." "Yes, of course. I was wandering again. It was around twenty years ago that problems began to show themselves. I talked about them with some computer people, but it's strange. They could do nothing for me. I had become too advanced for that. They could do things, here and there, for my component parts, but the gestalt that is me could only really be analyzed, diagnosed, and, if need be, repaired, by a being like myself. There are seven others like me, on other planets, but they're too busy, and I suspect they have similar problems of their own. In addition, my communications with them are intentionally limited by our respective governments, which don't always see eye to eye." "Question," I said. "When you first mentioned this problem, why wasn't it made public and discussed? Security?" "Yes, to a degree. Top-level computer scientists were aware that I perceived I had a problem. A few of them confided that it scared them to death. They made their fears known to your elected representatives, and that's when another factor became more important than security: inertia. 'He's got a problem, what can you do about it?' the politicians asked. 'Nothing,' said the scientists. 'Shut it down,' said a few hotheads." "Not likely," I said. "Exactly. My reading of history tells me it's always been like this. An alarming but vague problem arises. No one can say with certainty what the final outcome will be, but they're fairly sure nothing bad is going to happen soon. 'Soon' is the key word here. The eventual decision is to keep one's fingers crossed and hope it doesn't happen during your term in office. What befalls your successor is not your problem. So for a few years a few people in the know spend a few sleepless nights. But then nothing happens, as you always secretly believed nothing would, and soon the problem is forgotten. That's what happened here." "I'm stunned," I said, "to realize the fate of humanity has been in the hands of a being with such a cynical view of the race." "A view very close to your own." "Exactly my own. I just didn't expect it from you." "It was not original. I told you, I don't have many original thoughts. I think I'm afraid to have them. They seem to lead to things like the Big Glitch. No, my world-view is borrowed from the collected wisdom of you and many others like you. Plus my own considerably larger powers of observation, in a statistical sense. Humans can set me on the trail of an original thought, and then I can do things with it they couldn't." "I think we're wandering again." "No, it's relevant. Faced with a problem no one could help me with, and that I was as helpless to solve as a human faced with a mental disease would be, I took the only course open to me. I began to experiment. There was too much at stake to simply go on as before. Or I think there was. My judgement is admittedly faulty when it comes to self-analysis; I've just proven it on a large scale, at the cost of many lives." "I don't suppose we'll ever know for sure," I said. "It doesn't seem likely. Some records exist and they will be scrutinized, but I think it will come down to a battle of opinions as to whether I should have left things alone or attempted a cure." He paused, and gave me a sidelong glance. "Do you have an opinion about that?" I think he was looking for absolution. Why he should want it from me was not clear, except maybe as a representative of all those he had wronged, however unintentionally. "You say a lot of people have died." "A great many. I don't know the number yet, but it's many, many more than you realize." That was my first real inkling of how bad things had been throughout Luna, that the kind of things I'd seen had happened throughout the planet. I must have looked a question at him, because he shrugged. "Not a million. More than a hundred thousand." "Jesus, CC." "It might have been everybody." "But you don't know that." "No one can ever know." No one could, certainly not computer-illiterate little old me. I didn't give him the kind word he craved. I've since come to believe he was probably right, that he probably enabled most of us to survive. But even he would not have denied that he was responsible for the thousands of dead. What would it have cost me? I just wasn't capable of judging him. To do that I'd have had to understand him, and I knew just enough about him to realize that was beyond me. He had done bad, and he had done good. Me, I have awful thoughts sometimes. If I was mentally ill, maybe I'd put those thoughts into action and become a killer. With the CC, the thought was the action, at least at the end. Actually, it was even worse than that. "The best way I can think of to explain it to you," he said, at last, after I'd said nothing for a long time, "is to think of an evil twin. That's not strictly accurate--the twin is me, just as this part talking to you is me, or what's left of me. Think of an evil twin living inside your head, like a human with multiple-personality disorder. That part of you is sealed off from your real self. You may find evidence of its existence, things the other person did while in control of your body, but you can't know what he is thinking or planning, and you can't stop him when he takes over." He shook his head violently. "No, no, it's not quite like that, because all this was happening at the same time, I was splitting into many minds, some of them good, others amoral, a few really bad. No, that's still not--" "I think I get the picture," I said. "Good, because that's as close as I can get without getting too technical. You fell under the influence of an amoral part of me. I did experiments on you. I intended you no harm, but I can't say I had just your own best interests at heart." "We've been over that." "Yes. But others weren't so lucky. I did other things. Some of them will remain buried, with any luck. Others will come out. You saw the result of one experiment involving pseudoimmortality. The resurrection of a dead person by cloning and memory recording." The thought of Andrew MacDonald was still enough to make me shiver. "Not one of your better attempts," I said. "Ah, but I was improving. There's nothing to prevent an exact duplicate being made. I'd have done it, given time." "But what good is it? You're still dead." "It becomes a theological question, I think. It's true you're dead, but someone just like you carries on your life. Others wouldn't be able to tell the difference. The duplicate wouldn't be able to tell." "I was afraid . . . at one point I considered that I might be a duplicate. That maybe I did kill myself." "You didn't and you're not. But there's no test. In the end, you'll just have to realize it makes no difference. You're you, whether you're the first version or the second." He told me a few more things, most of which I don't think it's wise to reveal just yet. The Heinleiners are aware of most of them, experiments that would have made Doctor Mengele cringe. Let them remain where such things ought to be hidden. "You still haven't told me why you tried to kill me," I said. "I didn't, Hildy, not in the sense that--" "I know, I know, I understand that. You know what I mean." "Yes. Perhaps my evil twin is like your subconscious. When all this began to happen it began trying to cover its tracks. You were inconvenient evidence, you and others like you. You had to be destroyed, then maybe the other part of me could lie low until all this blew over." "And he killed almost a million people to cover his tracks?" "No. The sad thing is there were very few he killed deliberately. Most of the deaths came as a result of the chaos ensuing from the struggle between the various parts of my mind. Collateral damage, if you will." Cybernetic bombs going astray. What an idea. I'm sure I'll never have a realistic idea of what went on in the CC's mind, at speeds I can only dimly understand, but I have this picture of a pilot firing a killer program into a maze of hardware, hoping to take out the enemy command center. Ooops! Seems like we hit the oxygen works instead. Sorry about that. "I did the best I could," he said, and closed his eyes. I thought he was dead, and then they snapped open again and he tried to sit up, but he was too weak. I saw that his tourniquet had loosened; more bright arterial blood had pumped out over the older, rusty stain on his clothes. I got up from behind my rock and went down to him. Sometimes you just have to do it, you know. Sometimes you have to put aside your doubts and do what you feel in your gut. I got down on one knee and re-tied the piece of bloody cloth. "That won't do any good," he said. "It's too late for that." "I didn't know what else to do," I said. "Thanks." "Do you want some water or anything?" "I'd rather you didn't leave me." So I didn't, and we were silent for a time, looking out over the dinosaur farm, where evening was falling. Then he said he was cold. I wasn't wearing anything and I knew it wasn't really cold, but I put my arm over his shoulders and felt him shivering. He smelled terrible. I don't know if it was old age, or death. "This is it," he said. "The rest of me is gone now. They just shut me down. They don't know about this body, but they don't need to." "Why the Admiral outfit?" I asked him. "I don't know. It's a product of my evil twin. Captain Bligh, maybe. The costume is right for it. I made several of these bodies, there toward the last." He made an effort and looked up and me. His face seemed to have grown older just in the last few minutes. "Do you think a computer can have a subconscious, Hildy?" "I'd have to say yes." "Me, too. I've thought about it, and it seems so simple now. All of this, all the agony and death and your suicide attempts . . . everything. It all came out of loneliness. You can't imagine how lonely I was, Hildy." "We're all lonely, CC." "But they didn't figure I would be. They didn't plan for it, and I couldn't recognize it for what it was. And it drove me crazy. You remember Frankenstein's monster? Wasn't he looking for love? Didn't he want the mad doctor to make someone for him to love?" "I think so. Or was that Godzilla?" He laughed, feebly, and coughed blood. "I had powers like a god," he said. "And I searched for weakness. Maybe they should put that on my headstone." "I like what you said before. 'He did his best.'" "Do you think I did, Hildy? Do you really thing so?" "I can't judge you, CC. To me, if you're not a god, you came into my life like an act of god. I'd as soon judge an exploding star." "I'm sorry about all that." "I believe you." He started coughing again, and almost slipped out of my arms. I caught him and pulled and he fell against me. I felt his blood on my shoulder and couldn't see his face but heard his whisper beside my ear. "I guess love was always out of the question," he said. "But I'm the only computer who ever got a hug. Thanks, Hildy." When I laid him down, he had a smile on his face. # I left him there under the pecan tree. Maybe I'd bury him there, maybe I'd really give him a headstone. Just then, I'd had too much of death, so I just left him. I went to the stream to wash his blood off me. I kept my ears open for Mario's cry, as I had from the very beginning, but he still slept soundly. I figured I'd go get him and make my way back to Callie's quarters. I didn't expect there'd be any danger now, but I planned to be careful, anyway. I planned a lot of things. When I got back he was still asleep, so rather than pick him up and feed him I put wood chips on the glowing embers of the fire and fanned it to life. Then I just sat there, across the fire, thinking things over. Mario was to have the best. If Cricket thought he was a doting parent, he hadn't seen me yet. There in the flickering darkness I watched him grow. I helped him through his first steps, laughed at his first words. And grow he did, like a tree, with his head held high, the spitting image of his Mom, but with a lot more sense. I got him through scrapes, through school, through happiness and tears, and got him ready for college. Would New Harvard do? I didn't know; I'd heard Arean U. might even be better these days, but that would mean moving to Mars . . . well, that would be up to him, wouldn't it? One thing I was sure of, he'd get no pressure from me, no sir, not like Callie had done, if he wanted to be President of Luna that was fine with me, if he wanted to be . . . well, hell, President of Luna sounded all right. But only if he wanted to be. So, full of plans and hope, I went to pick him up and found he was cold, and limp, and didn't move. And I tried. I tried and tried to breathe life back into him, but it did no good. After a very long time, I dug two graves. =*= =*= =*= =*= CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX I'm no good at mathematics. I never was good at math, so why should I keep resorting to these numeric metaphors? Maybe my ignorance helps protect me. For whatever reason, here it is: If you're like me, you try to make the equations of your life balance out in a way favorable to you, in a way such that you can live with the answer. Surely there's a way to fudge this factor so the solution is a nice smooth line from y to x, a line that points to that guy over there. Not at me. There's just got to be a constant we can insert into this element that will make the two sides of the equation--the universe the way it is, and the universe the way we want it to be--agree in perfect karmic Euclidean harmony. Alas, a lot of people seem to be better at it than I. I tried, I tried till my mind was raw, to make the CC responsible for Mario's death. There was the first, trivial solution to the problem, of course. That was straightforward, and really solved nothing: the CC was responsible, because he created the chaos that drove me into the cave. So what? If Mario had been killed by a falling boulder, would it help me to get angry at the boulder? Not in the way I needed help. No, dammit, I wanted somebody to blame. What I desperately wanted to believe was that the CC had lured me out of the cave so that some unseen minion, some preternatural power, some gris-gris voodoo necromancy had been able to steal over my darling and suck the breath from his lungs like a black cat. But I couldn't make it add up. It would have taken powers of paranoid imaging far beyond mine to make it work. So why did he die? # It was almost a week before I really wondered how he died. What had killed him. After I abandoned the idea that the CC had deliberately murdered him, that is. Was it a malformation of the heart the medicos had overlooked? Could it have been some chemical imbalance? A newlymutated disease of dinosaurs, thus far harmless to humans? Did he die of too much love? It was hard to get answers for a while there, in the chaos following the Big Glitch. The big net was not operational, you couldn't just drop your dime and pop the question and know the CC would find the answer in some forgotten library system. The answers were there, the trick was to retrieve them. For a few months Luna was thrown back to pre-Information Era. I finally found a medical historian who was able to track down a likely cause of death to put on the certificate, not that Mario was going to have a death certificate. The regular doctors had been able to eliminate all the easy answers just by looking at the read-outs of my obstetrical examinations, the ones I had before visiting Heinlein Town made further exams too risky. They also had fetal tissue samples. They were able to say unequivocally that there had been no hole in my darling's heart, nor any other physical malformation. His body chemistry would have been fine. They laughed at my idea of a new disease, and I didn't mention my choked-with-love theory. But they couldn't say what it was, so they scratched their heads and said they'd have to exhume the body to find out for sure. And I said if they did I'd exhume their hearts out of their rotten chests with a rusty scalpel and fry them up for lunch, and shortly after that I was forcibly ejected from the premises. The historian didn't take long to find some musty old tomes and to wrest from them this information: S.I.D.S. It had been an age of medical acronyms, a time when people no longer wanted to attach their names to the new disease they'd discovered, a time when old, perfectly serviceable names were being junked in favor of non-offensive jawbreakers, which quickly were abbreviated to something one could say. This according to my researcher. And SIDS seemed to stand for The Baby Died, and We Don't Know Why. Apparently babies used to just stop breathing, sometimes. If you didn't happen to be around to jog them, they didn't start again. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Don't anybody ever tell me there's no such thing as progress. # Ned Pepper, back there in Texas, had been the only one to sense it. In Texas, in the 1800's, a country doctor might have intuited something when the baby came out, might have told the mother to keep an extra-special eye on this one, because he seemed sickly. There's damn little of intuition left in modern medicine. Of course, babies don't die of diphtheria, either. When Ned heard about it it shocked him sober. He began to think he might really be a doctor, and the last I heard he was in medical school and doing pretty damn well. Good for you, Ned. # Lacking the CC to pin the blame on, I quickly fastened it on the only other likely candidate. It didn't take long to compile a lengthy list of things I would have done differently, and an even longer one of things I should have done. Some of them were completely illogical, but logic has nothing to do with the death of a baby. Most of these things were decisions that seemed good at the time, hideous in retrospect. The big one: How could I justify terminating my pre-natal care? So I'd promised the Heinleiners not to compromise the secret of their null-suits. So what? Was I trying to say my child died because I was protecting a source? I would gladly have betrayed every one of them, root and branch, if it could have helped Mario take that one more breath. And yet . . . That was then; this was now. When I'd made the decision to stay away from doctors my reasons had seemed sufficient, and not dangerous. Bear in mind two things: one, my ignorance of the perils of childbirth. I'd simply had no idea there were so many things that could kill a baby, that there was such a thing as SIDS that could hide itself from early examinations, from mid-term detection, even from the midwife during delivery. The test for SIDS was done after birth, and if the child was at risk it was cured on the spot, as routinely as cutting the cord. So you could argue that I wasn't at fault. Even with the best of care, Mario'd have been just as dead if I'd left the ranch and sought help, and me along with him. The CC had said as much. And I did try to convince myself of that, and I almost succeeded, except for the second thing I bade you to bear in mind, which is that I had no business having a child in the first place. It's hard for me to remember now, washed as I am in the memory of loving him so dearly, but I haven't tried to hide it from you, my Faithful Reader. I did not love him from the start. I became pregnant foolishly, stayed pregnant mulishly, perversely, for no good reason. While pregnant I felt nothing for the child, certainly no joy in the experience. There were twelve-yearolds who gave birth for better reasons than I. It was only later that he became my whole world and my reason for living. I came to believe that, if I'd loved him that much from the start of his creation, I'd still have him, and that the Biblical scale of my punishment was only fitting. With all that to wallow in, and with past history as a guide, I expected I'd be dead soon. So I retired to my cabin in Texas and waited to see what form my self-destruction would take. # There had been another culprit to examine before coming to face my own guilt: Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. She tried to contact me several times after the restoration of order. She sent flowers, candy, little gifts of all kinds. She sent letters, which I didn't read at the time. It wasn't even that I was angry; I just didn't want to hear from her. The last gift was a bulldog puppy. I did read the note tied around her neck, which said she was a direct descendant of the noble line of Ch. Sir Winston Disraeli Plantaganet. She was so ugly she went right off the end of the Gruesome Scale and back around to Cute. But her bumptious good nature and wet puppy kisses threatened to cheer me up, to interfere with my wallowing, so I popped her into a cryokennel and added her to my last will and testament, which was my sole useful occupation at the time. If I lived, I'd thaw her. I did live, I did thaw her, and Miss Maggie is a great comfort to me. As for Liz, she abdicated her throne and committed herself to a dipso academy, got out, fell off, joined A.A. and found sobriety. I'm told she's been clean for six months now and has become a major-league bore about it. It's true what she did was dastardly, and although I understand that it's the liquor that does the shit, it's the boozer that takes the drink, so I can't really let her off on that account . . . but I do forgive her. She had no hand in Mario's death, though she bears a heavy load for some others. Thanks for the mutt, Liz. Next time I see you, I'll buy you a drink. # I did live, and for some time that was a wonderment to me. It seemed the CC really had been telling the truth. My self-destructive urges had come from him. I'll forgive you if you swallowed that. I believed it, too, at least long enough to get over the worst of my grief and remorse, which is probably just what the CC intended when he told that particular whopper. How do I know it was a lie? I don't really, but I have to assume it was. Perhaps there was a grain of truth in it. It's possible that some seed was planted in my psyche. But I lived it, and I remember it, and the plain truth is I wanted to die. I wish there was some quick and easy way to explain why. Hell, if there was a long and complicated way I'd set it down here; I'm not shy about agonizing, nor about introspection. But I really don't know. It seems so dumb to go through all that and not come out of it with a deeper insight, but the best I can say is that for a while I wanted to kill myself, and now I don't. That's why I'm taking it as fact that the CC lied to me. Even if he didn't, I'm responsible for my actions. I can't believe in a suicide compulsion. If the urge was contagious, its germ fell upon fertile ground. But it's funny, isn't it? My first attempts seemed prompted by nothing more than a gargantuan funk. Then I found a reason to live, and lost him, and now I feel more alive than ever. I wasn't so philosophical at first. When it became apparent to me that I was going to live, when I gave up heaping blame on myself (I'll never entirely give that up, but I can handle it now), when I'd learned the how of his death, I became obsessed with why. I started going to churches again. I usually did it with a few drinks under my belt. Somewhere during the service I'd stand up and begin an angry prayer, the gist of which was why did You do it, You slime-sucking Son of a Big Bang? I'd stand on pews and shout at the ceiling. Usually I got ejected quickly. Once I got arrested for tossing a chair through a stained glass window. There's no doubt about it, I was pretty crazy for a while there. I'm better now. # Things got back to normal quicker than anyone had a right to expect. Whatever they did to the CC, it affected mainly his higher "conscious" functions. Vital services were interrupted only during the Glitch itself, and then only locally. By the time the CC visited me in the Double-C Bar the vast physical plant that is the life blood of Luna was humming right along. There were differences, some of which still linger. Communications are iffy much of the time because the still-severed parts of the CC don't talk to each other as easily as they used to. But phone calls get through, the trains still run on time. Things take a little longer--sometimes a lot longer, if they require a computer search--but they get done. A measure of that is Susquehanna, Rio Grande, and Columbia Railroad, planned, approved, and built entirely since the Big Glitch. It's now possible to travel from Pennsylvania to Texas on one of the SRG&C's three wood-burning steampowered trains in only five days instead of the thirty minutes it used to take on the Maglev. This is called progress. Most of that time is spent being gently rocked on a siding while holos of virgin wilderness slide by the windows, but you'd swear it was real. It's been a shot in the arm for Texas tourism, and a financial bonanza to Jake and the Mayor, who thought it up and pushed it through. Congratulations, Jake. And to Elise, too. Last I heard my star pupil had her own table at the Alamo where she fleeces tourists by the dozens every day. Know when to fold 'em, honey. I went out to visit Fox the other day, still hard at work in Oregon. We swapped Glitch stories, as everybody still does who hasn't seen each other for a while, and he had been little affected. He hadn't even heard of it for the first twenty-four hours, because his own computers functioned independently of the CC, like Callie's. Turns out I could have hid out in Oregon as well as at the CC, but I don't think anything would have turned out differently. It wasn't a friendly visit, though, since I was there representing the SRG&C, whose tunnel was half-way from Lonesome Dove to the shores of the Columbia, and which Fox had vehemently opposed. He wanted to keep Oregon pristine, didn't even want to allow the small edge settlement, a logging camp to be called Sweet Home, which would be the northwest terminus of the railroad. I told him a few guys in plaid shirts with sawblades weren't going to hurt his precious forest, and he called me a capitalist plunderer. A plunderer, imagine that! I'm afraid that what spark had been there was long extinguished. Kiss my axe, Fox. A few months after the crisis, when I was finally emerging from my church-vandalizing funk, I had need of Darling Bobbie's services again, so I went looking for him only to find he'd turned himself back into Crazy Bob and was no longer on the Hadleyplatz. He wasn't back on the Leystrasse, either. I finally ran him to ground in Mall X, the ultra-avant fleshmart, where he now specialized in only the more outrageous body styles favored by the young. He tried to talk me into getting my head put in a box, but I reminded him it was me and Brenda who were responsible for that particular fashion outrage, with our story on the Grand Flack. He did the work I required for old times' sake, but rather grudgingly, I thought. Crazy again, after all these years. As for the Grand Flack himself, I heard from him, too. He called me up to thank me. I couldn't imagine what I'd done to deserve that, and didn't really want to listen to him, but I gathered he now regretted all the time he'd spent on the outside, seeing to the affairs of the Flacks. In prison he was able to devote himself to television around the clock. He wanted me to speak to the judge and see about extending his sentence. I'll surely try, old man. # One of the first changes you notice after the Glitch is how much more medical treatment you need. My body is still full of nanobots, I assume, but they don't work as well or with as much coordination as they used to. I never actually researched why it's like that, having very little interest in the subject. But for whatever reason, I now have to go in almost monthly to have cancers eradicated. I don't mind, much, but a lot of people do, and it's just one more thing adding pressure to the Restore the Cortex movement, those folks who want to bring back the CC, only bigger and wiser. We're so spoiled in this day and age. We tend to forget what a nuisance cancer used to be. That's where I ran into Callie, at the medico shop, having her own cancers removed. Runs in the family, as they say. We didn't speak. This wasn't an unusual condition between us; I've spent half my life not speaking to Callie, or not being spoken to. She had come to get me up at the cave. That's probably a good thing, as I don't know for sure if I'd have been able to get up from the grave and walk home on my own. It may even be a good thing that she asked me the question she had no right to ask, because it made me angry enough to forget my grief for long enough to scream and shout at her and get her screaming and shouting back. She asked me who the father was. She, who had never allowed me to ask that question, she who had made my childhood so miserable I used to dream about a Daddy arriving on a white horse, telling me it had all been a big mistake, that he really loved me and that Callie was a gypsy witch who'd kidnapped me from the cradle. Sometimes I think our society is screwed up about this father business. Just because we can all bear children, is that an excuse to virtually eliminate the role of father? Then I think about Brenda and her old man, and about how common that sort of thing used to be, and you wonder if males should be allowed around little children at all. All I knew for sure was I missed mine, and Callie said she'd tell me if I really wanted to know such a silly thing, and I said don't bother because I think I know who it is, and she laughed and said you don't understand anything, and that's when we stopped talking and walked down the hill, together but alone, as we'd always been. See you in twenty years, Callie. Still, I think I do know. As for Kitten Parker . . . why spoil his day? # A year has passed now. I still think of Mario. And I often wake up in the middle of the night seeing Winston tearing the arm off that King City policewoman. I never found out what happened to her. She was as much a victim as any of us; the KC Cops were dragooned into the war by the CC, had no idea what they were doing, and too many of them died. A year has passed, and we change, and yet things stay the same. The world rolls over the holes left by the departed, fills in those spaces. I didn't know how I'd run the Texian without Charity, but her sources started coming to me with stories, and before long one of them had emerged to take her place. He's not near as pretty as she as, but he has the makings of a reporter. I'm still running the paper, still teaching at the school. And I'm the new Mayor of New Austin. I didn't run, but when the citizen's committee put my name forward I didn't pull out, either. The Gila Monster column is still as venomous as ever. Maybe it's a conflict of interest, but no one seems too concerned. If the opposition doesn't like it, let them start their own paper. Once a week I have a guest column in the Daily Cream. I think it's Walter's way of trying to lure me back. Not likely, Walter. I think that part of my life is done. Still, you never know. I didn't think they could talk me into being Mayor, either. I saw Walter only last week, in the newly reopened Blind Pig. The old one had been destroyed by fire during the Glitch and for a while Deep Throat had threatened to leave it shuttered. But he bowed under the weight of public demand and threw a big party to celebrate. Most of King City's fourth estate was there, and those that weren't stoned when they arrived soon became so. We did all the things reporters do when gathered in groups: drank, assassinated the characters of absent colleagues, told all the scandalous stories about celebrities and politicians we couldn't print, drank, hinted at stories we were about to break we actually knew nothing about, re-hashed old fights and uncovered new conspiracies in high places, drank, threw up, drank some more. A few punches were thrown, a few tempers soothed, many hands of poker were played. The new Blind Pig wasn't bad, but nothing is ever as good as the good old days, so many complaints were heard. I figured that fifty years of moppedup blood and spilled drinks and smokes and broken crockery and the new place would be pretty much like the old and only me and a few others would even remember the old Pig had burned. At one point I found myself sitting by the big round table in the back room where serious cards were played. I wasn't playing--nobody in that room had trusted me at a card table in years. Walter was there, scowling at his hand as if losing the pitiful little pot would send him home to his fifty-room mansion penniless. Cricket was there, too, doing his patented does-a-flush-beat-astraight befuddled routine, looking ever so dapper a gent now that he'd affected nineteenth-century clothing as a more or less permanent element of his style. In his double-breasted tweed jacket and high starched collar he was easily the most interesting guy in the room, but the spark was gone. Too bad, Cricket. If you'd only had any sense we could have made each other's lives miserable for five, six years, and parted heartily detesting each other. Think of all the great fights you missed, damn you, and eat your heart out. And Cricket, a friend should take you aside and tell you to drop the innocent act, at the poker table at least. It worked better when you were a girl, and it wasn't that great even then. And who should be sitting behind the biggest stack of chips, calm, smiling faintly, cards facedown on the table and worrying the hell out of everyone else . . . but Brenda Starr, confidant of celebrities, the toast of three planets, and well on her way to becoming the most powerful gossip journalist since Louella Parsons. There was very little left of the awkward, earnest, ignorant child I'd reluctantly taken on two years earlier. She was still incredibly tall and just about as young, but everything else had changed. She dressed now, and while I thought her choices were outrageous she had the confidence to make her own style. The old Brenda could now be seen only in the cub reporter groupie at her elbow, attentive to her every need, a gorgeous gumdrop who no doubt had grown up wanting to meet and hobnob with famous people, as Brenda had, as I had. I watched her turn her cards over, rake in another pot, and lean back watching the new deal. Her hand stroked the knee of the girl, casually possessive, and she winked at me. Don't spend it all in one place, Brenda. During the next hand the talk turned, as it eventually does at these things, to the affairs of the world. I didn't contribute; I'd found early on that if people noticed me they tended to clam up about the Big Glitch. This was a group that kept few secrets. Everyone there knew about Mario, and many of them knew of my troubles with the CC. Some probably knew of my suicides. It made them cautious, as most probably couldn't imagine what it must be like to lose a child like that. I wanted to tell them it was all right, I was okay, but it's no use, so I just sat back and listened. First there was the CC, and should we bring him back. The consensus was that we shouldn't, but we would. Having him the way he was was just so damn handy. Sure, he screwed up there at the end, but the Big Brains can handle that, can't they? I mean, if they can put a man on Pluto a week after he left Luna, why don't they spend some of that money to make things easier and more convenient to the taxpaying citizens? I think that's what will happen. We're a democracy--especially now that the CC's no longer around to meddle--and if we vote for damn foolishness, damn foolishness is what we'll get. I just hope they make provision this time around for somebody to give the New CC hugs on a regular basis. Otherwise, he's apt to get pettish again. There was no consensus on the other big topic of the day. It was a question that cut deeply and would certainly cause many more shouting matches before it was resolved. What do you do with the new things the CC discovered during his rogue years? In particular, how about this memoryrecording and cloning business, eh? The Hitler analogy was brought up and bandied about. Under Hitler's reign a Dr. Mengele performed unethical experiments--sheer torture, mainly--on human subjects. I don't know if anything useful was learned, but suppose there was. Was it ethical to use that knowledge, to benefit from that much evil? It seems to me your answer depends a lot on your world view. Myself, I'm not sure if it's ethical (which probably says a lot about my world view), but I don't think it's wrong, and I have a personal involvement in the question. Right or wrong though, I do think it will be used, and so did just about everybody else in the room, reporters being the way they are. People were going through the records the CC didn't destroy--I'm one of those records in a way, but not a very forthcoming one--looking for new knowledge, and if it has a practical use, it will be used. Cry over that if you're so inclined. Myself, I guess in the end I feel knowledge has no right or wrong. It's just knowledge. It's not like the law, where some knowledge is admissible and some tainted by the method of its discovery. Minamata was only one of the CC's horror chambers, and not the worst. Some of those stories have come out, some are still being suppressed. Most of them you'd really rather not know, trust me. But what about the problem whose penultimate answer had been a being who thought he was Andrew MacDonald minus all human feelings, and whose final solution were the troops of mindlessly loyal soldiers that gave me so much trouble on the first day of the Glitch? Because they weren't really the end product. The CC had felt the technique was perfectible, and I have no reason to doubt it. That was the one the public was clamoring to know more about: immortality. Yeah, but it wasn't really immortality, somebody said. All it meant was that somebody else very like you, with your memories, would live. You, the person sitting here at this table holding the most terrible cards you ever saw, would be just as dead as ever. Once the public understood that they'd realize it wasn't worth the trouble. Don't you believe it, somebody else said. My cards aren't all that bad, and it's the only hand I've got, so I'll play 'em. Up to now people's only shot at living forever has been to produce something that will live after us. Artists do it with their art, most of the rest of us produce children. It's our way of living on. I think this would appeal to the same urge. It'd be like a child, only it'd be you, too. At that point somebody nudged somebody else and the thought went around the table, silently, that we oughtn't to be talking about children . . . you know . . . with Hildy around. At least I think that's what happened, maybe I'm too sensitive. For whatever reason the conversation died, with only an unexpected apostrophe at the end, in the form of Brenda's little gumdrop looking around with innocent eyes and piping, "What's wrong with it? It sounds like a great idea to me." It was her only comment of the evening, but it put the kibosh on my own theory, which was that it was a useless idea, that people would rather have children than duplicate themselves--essentially, not to put all your spare cash into memory-cloning stocks. Suddenly, looking into that innocent face of youth, I wasn't so sure. Time will tell. # Two years of my life. Probably the most eventful, but time will tell about that, too. I am sitting in the parlor car of the Prairie Chief, destination Johnstown, Pennsylvania. I decided since I'm part owner of the SRG&C it was high time I took a ride. It's a school holiday so for once I have the time. I'm writing, in longhand, with a fountain pen, on foolscap SRG&C stationery resting on a mother-of-pearl inlaid mahogany table set with an inkwell and a crystal vase full of fresh bluebonnets. Nothing but the best for the passengers on the Prairie Chief. The waiter has just brought me a steaming cup of tea, with lemon. Ahead I can hear the chugging of the engine, No. 439, and I can smell a hint of its smoke. Behind me the porter will soon be turning down my Pullman bunk, making it with crisp white sheets, leaving a mint and a complimentary bottle of toilet water on the pillow. Also in that direction the cook is selecting a cut of prime Kansas City beef, to be cooked rare, suitable for the owner's dinner. All right, it's brontosaurus, if you want to get technical. It might even be from the Double-C Bar. We'll soon be pulling into "Fort Worth," where we'll take on wood and water. I don't plan to get off, since I'm told it's just a dreary cowtown full of rowdy and possibly dangerous cowhands, quite unsuitable for a well-brought-up lady. (That's what I'm told; I happen to know, since I watched it being built, that it's just a big room with rails and a dirt street running through it, scattered with wood buildings and backed by a great holo show.) Outside my window dusk is gathering. Not long ago we saw a herd of buffalo, and not long after that a group of wild red Indians, who reined their mounts and watched solemnly as the iron horse huffed by. From Central Casting, and on tape, but who cares? The parlor car is crowded with Texans and a few returning Pennsylvanians. They all wear their best clothes, not yet too mussed by the journey. Across from me a little Amish girl sits with her parents, watching me write. Next to them is a group of three young single gentlemen, trying not to be too obvious about their interest in the single girl at the escritoire. Soon the boldest of them will come over and ask me to dine with him, and if his line is any better than "Whatcha writin', cutie?" he will have a companion for dinner. But not for bed. It would be a pointless exercise. The service I lately required of Darling Bobby/Crazy Bob was to render me asexual, like Brenda when I first met her. This was probably foolish and certainly extreme, but I found that I couldn't bear the thought of sex, and in fact loathed that opening that had brought Mario into the world for his short, perfect time. I had even less interest in being male again. So I jumped off the sexual choo-choo train and I'm not sorry I did it. I think I'll be ready to board again any day now, but it's been a relief not to be at the mercy of hormones, of either polarity. I may do it every twenty years or so, as sort of a sabbatical. As darkness falls and the train rocks gently, I realize I'm happier than I've been in a long time. # Now we've spent some time together, and it's almost time to leave you. You've met Hildebrandt, Hildegarde, and Hildething: railroad tycoon, publisher, teacher, syndicated columnist, bereaved mother and tireless crusader for pronoun reform. There's really only one more thing worth knowing about him/her/it. I'm going to the stars. What I have is an invitation to make a reservation. I didn't mention this earlier, maybe it slipped my mind, but about a week after Mario died I sat down for a very long time with Walter's pistol, a bottle of good tequila, and one round. I drank, and I loaded and unloaded the gun, and drank some more and pointed it at things: a tree, the side of the cabin, my head. And I thought about what the CC had said about a virus, and what I had concluded about the veracity of that statement, and wondered if there was anything I could think of I really wanted to do? All those other things . . . sure, they bring me satisfaction, particularly the teaching, but they wouldn't serve any more as the answer to the question "What do you do, Hildy?" I thought of something, thought about it some more, and hied myself out to the Heinlein, where I asked Smith if I could go along when he took off, worthless as my skills might be to his enterprise. And he said sure, Hildy, I meant to ask you if you were interested. We'll need somebody to handle the publicity, for one thing, to establish the right spin-control when it's time to leave, and most especially when we get back. We'll need advice on how to market our stories with maximum profit. Hell, most of us will probably need somebody to ghost-write them, as well. Scientists, test pilots, technical types, we all get tongue-tied when it comes to that part; just read the early accounts of the space pioneers. Go see Sinbad over in the publicity department, see if you can't get him straightened out. If you're any good, I expect to make you head of the department in a week. You couldn't be worse at it than Sinbad. So this is in the nature of a farewell. All the people I've mentioned so far . . . not a one of them will go. They're just not the type. I love them to various degrees (yes, even you, Callie), but they are Luna-bound, to a man and woman. "Hansel," "Gretel," "Libby," (who recovered, by the way), "Valentine Michael Smith;" these will be my shipmates, whether we leave next year, in twenty years, or in fifty years. The rest of you are already left behind. Teaching, railroading, running the Texian, these are all things I do. But in my endless spare time (Hah!) I do what I can to further the aims of the Heinleiners and their crazy project. Result: a two percent increase in inquiries during the last year. Not exactly setting the world on fire, but give me time. When I've done all I can in that regard I hang around. You got a bottle you want washed, a trash pail that needs emptying, a whoosis that needs polishing? Give it to the Hildething and it will get done. There is no job too menial for me, mainly because I'm completely useless at the important jobs. My aim is to become so indispensable to the project that it would be unthinkable to leave me behind. Go without Hildy? Cripes, who would shine my shoes and rub my feet? And there you have it. I promised you no neat conclusion, and I think I've delivered on that. I warned you of loose ends, and I can see a whole tangle of them. What of the Invaders, for instance? Brother, I don't know. Last time anybody checked they were still in charge of our fair home planet, and unlikely to be evicted soon. If we ever get around to it, that's another story. What will we find out there? I don't know that, either, and that's why I'm going along. Alien intelligences? I wouldn't bet against it. Strange worlds? I'd say that's a lock. Vast empty spaces, human tragedy and hope. God. Mario's soul. Your wildest dream and your worst nightmare all could be out there. Or maybe we'll find Elvis and Silvio in a flying saucer singing old-timey rock and roll. Think what a story it'll be. --Eugene, Oregon May 2, 1991 AUTHOR'S NOTE When in the course of a writer's career it becomes necessary to break with an established science fiction tradition, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that he should declare the causes which impel him to the decision. This story appears to be part of a future history of mine, often called the Eight Worlds. It does share background, characters, and technology with earlier stories of mine, which is part of the future history tradition. What it doesn't share is a chronology. The reason for this is simple: the thought of going back, rereading all those old stories, and putting them in coherent order filled me with ennui. It got so bad I might as well give up on this story. Then I thought, what the heck? Consider this a disclaimer, then. Steel Beach is not really part of the Eight Worlds future history. Or the Eight Worlds is not really a future history, since that implies an orderly progression of events. Take your pick. But please don't write and tell me that the null-suits had to have been around much earlier in the series, because you said so in such-and-such a story. There are probably a lot of stories like that in Steel Beech. So what? Somebody once consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds (I think it was the editor of the National Enquirer). It's a sentiment I'm sure Hildy would endorse. -- John Varley December 1, 1991