Steel Beach

by John Varley

  "Well, there's sex in it, naturally. Just not the right kind. I mean, I could write a story about earthworm sex, or jellyfish sex, but it wouldn't turn anybody on but earthworms and jellyfish."

  "Exactly. Why is that, Hildy? Why do they want to turn us into jellyfish?"

  I knew all about this particular hobbyhorse, but there was nothing to do but ride it.

  "It's like the search for the Holy Grail, or the Philosopher's Stone," I said.

  "What's the Philosopher's Stone?"

  The question had not come from Walter, but from behind me. I was pretty sure I knew who it was. I turned, and saw Brenda, cub reporter, who for the past two weeks had been my journalistic assistant-pronounced "copy girl."

  "Sit down, Brenda," Walter said. "I'll get to you in a minute."

  I watched her dither around pulling up a chair, folding herself into it like a collapsible ruler with bony joints sticking out in all directions, surely too many joints for one human being. She was very tall and very thin, like so many of the younger generation. I had been told she was seventeen, out on her first vocational education try-out. She was eager as a puppy and not half as graceful.

  She irritated the hell out of me. I'm not sure why. There's the generational thing. You wonder how things can get worse, you think that these kids have to be the rock bottom, then they have children and you see how wrong you were.

  At least she could read and write, I'll give her that. But she was so damnably earnest, so horribly eager to please. She made me tired just looking at her. She was a tabula rasa waiting for someone to draw animated cartoons on. Her ignorance of everything outside her particular upper-middle class social stratum and of everything that had happened more than five years ago was still un-plumbed.

  She opened the huge purse she always carried around with her and produced a cheroot identical to the one Walter was smoking. She lit up and exhaled a cloud of lavender smoke. Her smoking dated to the day after she met Walter Editor. Her name dated to the day after she met me. Maybe it should have amused or flattered me that she was so obviously trying to emulate her elders; it just made me angry. Adopting the name of a famous fictional reporter had been my idea.

  Walter gestured for me to go on. I sighed, and did so.

  "I really don't know when it started, or why. But the basic idea was, since sex and reproduction no longer have much to do with each other, why should we have sex with our reproductive organs? The same organs we use for urination, too, for that matter."

  "'If it ain't broke, don't fix it,'" Walter said. "That's my philosophy. The old-fashioned system worked for millions of years. Why tamper with it?'

  "Actually, Walter, we've already tampered with it quite a bit."

  "Not everybody."

  "True. But well over eighty percent of females prefer clitoral relocation. The natural arrangement didn't provide enough stimulation during the regular sex act. And just about that many men have had a testicle tuck. They were too damn vulnerable hanging out there where nature put them."

  "I haven't had one," he said. I made note of that, in case I ever got into a fight with him.

  "Then there's the question of stamina in males," I went on. "Back on Earth, it was the rare male over thirty who could consistently get an erection more than three or four times a day. And it usually didn't last very long. And men didn't have multiple orgasms. They just weren't as sexually capable as women."

  "That's horrible," Brenda said. I looked at her; she was genuinely shocked.

  "That's an improvement, I'll have to admit," Walter said.

  "And there's the entire phenomenon of menstruation," I added.

  "What's menstruation?"

  We both looked at her. She wasn't joking. Walter and I looked at each other and I could read his thoughts.

  "Anyway," I said, "you just pointed out the challenge. Lots of people get altered in one way or another. Some, like you, stay almost natural. Some of the alterations aren't compatible with others. Not all of them involve penetration of one person by another, for instance. What these newsex people are saying is, if we're going to tamper, why not come up with a system that is so much better than the others that everyone will want to be that way? Why should the sensations we associate with 'sexual pleasure' be always and forever the result of friction between mucous membranes? It's the same sort of urge people had about languages back on Earth, back when there were hundreds of languages, or about weights and measures. The metric system caught on, but Esperanto didn't. Today we have a few dozen languages still in use, and more types of sexual orientation than that."

  I settled back in my chair, feeling foolish. But I'd done my part. Now Walter could get on with whatever he had in mind. I glanced at Brenda, and she was staring at me with the wide-eyed look of an acolyte to a guru.

  Walter took another drag on his cheroot, exhaled, and leaned back in his chair, fingers laced behind his head.

  "You know what today is?" he asked.

  "Thursday," Brenda supplied. Walter glanced at her, but didn't bother to reply. He took another drag.

  "It's the one hundred and ninety-ninth anniversary of the Invasion and Occupation of the Planet Earth."

  "Remind me to light a candle and say a novena."

  "You think it's funny."

  "Nothing funny about it," I said. "I just wonder what it has to do with me."

  Walter nodded, and put his feet down on the floor.

  "How many stories have you seen on the Invasion in the last week? The week leading up to this anniversary?"

  I was willing to play along.

  "Let's see. Counting the stuff in the Straight Shit, the items in the Lunarian and the K.C. News, that incisive series in Lunatime, and of course our own voluminous coverage… none. Not a single story."

  "That's right. I think it's time somebody did something about that."

  "While we're at it, let's do a big spread on the Battle of Agincourt, and the first manned landing on Mars."

  "You do think it's funny."

  "I'm merely applying a lesson somebody taught me when I started here. If it happened yesterday, it ain't news. And the News Nipple reports the news."

  "This isn't strictly for the Nipple," Walter admitted.

  "Uh-oh."

  He ignored my expression, which I hoped was sufficiently sour, and plowed ahead.

  "We'll use cuts from your stories in the Nipple. Most of 'em, anyway. You'll have Brenda to do most of the leg work."

  "What are you talking about?" Brenda asked Walter. When that didn't work, she turned to me. "What's he talking about?"

  "I'm talking about the supplement."

  "He's talking about the old reporters' graveyard."

  "Just one story a week. Will you let me explain?"

  I settled back in my chair and tried to turn off my brain. Oh, I'd fight it hard enough, but I knew I didn't have much choice when Walter got that look in his eye.

  The News Nipple Corporation publishes three pads. The first is the Nipple itself, updated hourly, full of what Walter Editor liked to think of as "lively" stories: the celebrity scandal, the pseudo-scientific breakthrough, psychic predictions, lovingly bloody coverage of disasters. We covered the rougher and more proletarian sports, and a certain amount of politics, if the proposition involved could be expressed in a short sentence. The Nipple had so many pictures you hardly needed to read the words. Like the other padloids, it would not have bothered with any copy but for the government literacy grants that often provided the financial margin between success and failure. A daily quota of words was needed to qualify for the grants. That exact number of words appeared in each of our issues, including "a," "an," "and," and "the."

  The Daily Cream was the intellectual appendix to the swollen intestine of the Nipple. It came free to every subscriber of the pad-those government grants again-and was read by about one in ten, according to our more optimistic surveys. It published thousands of times more words per hour, and included most of our political coverage.

&
nbsp; Somewhere between those two was the electronic equivalent of the Sunday supplement, published weekly, called Sundae.

  "Here's what I want," Walter went on. "You'll go out and cover your regular beats. But I want you to be thinking Sundae while you do that. Whatever you're covering, think about how it would have been different two hundred years ago, back on Earth. It can be anything at all. Like today, sex. There's a topic for you. Write about what sex was like back on Earth, and contrast it to what it's like now. You could even throw in stuff about what people think it's gonna be like in another twenty years, or a century."

  "Walter, I don't deserve this."

  "Hildy, you're the only man for it. I want one article per week for the entire year leading up to the bicentennial. I'm giving you a free hand as to what they're about. You can editorialize. You can personalize, make it like a column. You've always wanted a column; here's your chance at a by-line. You want expensive consultants, advisors, research? You name it, you got it. You need to travel? I'm good for the money. I want only the best for this series."

  I didn't know what to say to that. It was a good offer. Nothing in life is ever exactly what you asked for, but I had wanted a column, and this seemed like a reasonable shot at it.

  "Hildy, during the twentieth century there was a time like no other time humans have seen before or since. My grandfather's great-grandfather was born in the year the Wright brothers made the first powered flight. By the time he died, there was a permanent base on Luna. My grandfather was ten when the old man died, and he's told me many times how he used to talk about the old days. It was amazing just how much change that old man had seen in his lifetime.

  "In that century they started talking about a 'generation gap.' So much happened, so many things changed so fast, how was a seventy-year-old supposed to talk to a fifteen-year-old in terms they both could understand?

  "Well, things don't change quite that fast anymore. I wonder if they ever will again? But we've got something in common with those people. We've got kids like Brenda here who hardly remember anything beyond last year, and they're living side by side with people who were born and grew up on the Earth. People who remember what a one-gee gravity field was like, what it was to walk around outside and breathe free, un-metered air. Who were raised when people were born, grew up, and died in the same sex. People who fought in wars. Our oldest citizens are almost three hundred now. Surely there's fifty-two stories in that.

  "This is a story that's been waiting two hundred years to be told. We've had our heads in the sand. We've been beaten, humiliated, suffered a racial set-back that I'm afraid… "

  It was as if he suddenly had heard what he was saying. He sputtered to a stop, not looking me in the eye.

  I was not used to speeches from Walter. It made me uneasy. The assignment made me uneasy. I don't think about the Invasion much-which was precisely his point, of course-and I think that's just as well. But I could see his passion, and knew I'd better not fight it. I was used to rage, to being chewed out for this or that. Being appealed to was something brand new. I felt it was time to lighten the atmosphere a little.

  "So how big a raise are we talking about here?" I asked.

  He settled back in his chair and smiled, back on familiar ground.

  "You know I never discuss that. It'll be in your next paycheck. If you don't like it, gripe to me then."

  "And I have to use the kid on all this stuff?"

  "Hey! I'm right here," Brenda protested.

  "The kid is vital to the whole thing. She's your sounding board. If a fact from the old days sounds weird to her, you know you're onto something. She's contemporary as your last breath, she's eager to learn and fairly bright, and she knows nothing. You'll be the middle man. You're about the right age for it, and history's your hobby. You know more about old Earth than any man your age I've ever met."

  "If I'm in the middle… "

  "You might want to interview my grandfather," Walter suggested. "But there'll be a third member of your team. Somebody Earth-born. I haven't decided yet who that'll be.

  "Now get out of here, both of you."

  I could see Brenda had a thousand questions she still wanted to ask. I warned her off with my eyes, and followed her to the door.

  "And Hildy," Walter said. I looked back.

  "If you put words like abnegation and infibulation in these stories, I'll personally caponize you."

  CHAPTER THREE

  I pulled the tarp off my pile of precious lumber and watched the scorpions scuttle away in the sunlight. Say what you want about the sanctity of life; I like to crush 'em.

  Deeper in the pile I'd disturbed a rattlesnake. I didn't see him, but could hear him warning me away. Handling them from the ends, I selected a plank and pulled it out. I shouldered it and carried it to my half-finished cabin. It was evening, the best time to work in West Texas. The temperature had dropped to ninety-five in the old-style scale they used there. During the day it had been well over a hundred.

  I positioned the plank on two sawhorses near what would be the front porch when I was finished. I squatted and looked down its length. This was a one-by-ten-inches, not centimeters-which meant it actually measured about nine by seven eighths, for reasons no one had ever explained to me. Thinking in inches was difficult enough, without dealing in those odd ratios called fractions. What was wrong with decimals, and what was wrong with a one-by-ten actually being one inch by ten inches? Why twelve inches in a foot? Maybe there was a story in it for the bicentennial series.

  The plank had been advertised as ten feet long, and that measurement was accurate. It was also supposed to be straight, but if it was they had used a noodle for a straightedge.

  Texas was the second of what was to be three disneylands devoted to the eighteenth century. Out here west of the Pecos we reckoned it to be 1845, the last year of the Texas Republic, though you could use technology as recent as 1899 without running afoul of the anachronism regulations. Pennsylvania had been the first of the triad, and my plank, complete with two big bulges in the width and a depressing sag when held by one end, had been milled there by "Amish" sawyers using the old methods. A little oval stamp in a corner guaranteed this: "Approved, Lunar Antiquities Reproduction Board." Either the methods of the 1800's couldn't reliably produce straight and true lumber, or those damn Dutchmen were still learning their craft.

  So I did what the carpenters of the Texas Republic had done. I got out my plane (also certified by the L.A.R.B.), removed the primitive blade, sharpened it against a home-made whetstone, re-attached the blade, and began shaving away the irregularities.

  I'm not complaining. I was lucky to get the lumber. Most of the cabin was made of rough-hewn logs notched together at the ends, chinked with adobe.

  The board had turned gray in the heat and sun, but after a few strokes I was down to the yellow pine interior. The wood curled up around the blade and the chips dropped around my bare feet. It smelled fresh and new and I found myself smiling as the sweat dripped off my nose. It would be good to be a carpenter, I thought. Maybe I'd quit the newspaper business.

  Then the blade broke and jammed into the wood. My palm slipped off the knob in front and tried to skate across the fresh-planed surface, driving long splinters into my skin. The plane clattered off the board and went for my toe with the hellish accuracy of a pain-guided missile.

  I shouted a few words rarely heard in 1845, and some uncommon even in the 23rd century. I hopped around on one foot. Another lost art, hopping.

  "It could have been worse," a voice said in my ear. It was either incipient schizophrenia, or the Central Computer. I bet on the CC.

  "How? By hitting both feet?"

  "Gravity. Consider the momentum such a massive object could have attained, had this really been West Texas, which lies at the bottom of a space-time depression twenty-five thousand miles per hour deep."

  Definitely the CC.

  I examined my hand. Blood was oozing from it, running down my forearm and dripping
from the elbow. But there was no arterial pumping. The foot, though it still hurt like fire, was not damaged.

  "You see now why laborers in 1845 wore work boots."

  "Is that why you called, CC? To give me a lecture about safety in the work place?"

  "No. I was going to announce a visitor. The colorful language lesson was an unexpected bonus of my tuning in on-"

  "Shut up, will you?"

  The Central Computer did so.

  The end of a splinter protruded from my palm, so I pulled on it. I got some, but a lot was still buried in there. Others had broken off below skin level. All in all, a wonderful day's work.

  A visitor? I looked around and saw no one, though a whole tribe of Apaches could have been hiding in the clumps of mesquite. I had not expected to see any sign of the CC. It uses the circuitry in my own head to produce its voice.

  And it wasn't supposed to manifest itself in Texas. As is often the case, there was more to the CC than it was telling.

  "CC, on-line, please."

  "I hear and obey."

  "Who's the visitor?"

  "Tall, young, ignorant of tampons, with a certain puppy-like charm-"

  "Oh, Jesus."

  "I know I'm not supposed to intrude on these antique environments, but she was quite insistent on learning your location, and I thought it better for you to have some forewarning than to-"

  "Okay. Now shut up."

  I sat in the rickety chair which had been my first carpentry project. Being careful of the injured hand, I pulled on the work boots I should have been wearing all along. The reason I hadn't was simple: I hated them.

  There was another story for Walter. Shoes. If Lunarians wear them, they tend to be the soft kind, like moccasins, or socks. Reason: in a crowded urban environment of perfectly smooth floors and carpets and a majority of bare-foot people, hard shoes are anti-social. You could break someone else's toes.

  Once I had my feet jammed into the smelly things I had to search for the buttonhook. Buttons, on shoes! It was outrageous. How had people ever tolerated such things? To add insult to inutility, the damn things had cost me a fortune.