Steel Beach

by John Varley

  I was watching the tiny battleships in the lagoon when I realized I'd seen the show about a dozen times already, and that my chin was resting on the bar. To enhance the view, I suppose. I sat up straight, a little embarrassed. I glanced at Cricket, but she was making a great show of producing little moist rings with the bottom of her glass. I wiped my brow, and swiveled on my stool to look at the rest of the room.

  "The usual motley crew," Cricket said.

  "The motliest," I agreed. "In fact, the word 'motley' might have been coined simply to describe this scene."

  "Maybe we should retire the word. Give it a place of honor in the etymological hall of fame, like Olympic champions' jerseys."

  "Put it right next to motherhood, love, happiness… words like that."

  "On that note, I'll buy you another drink."

  I hadn't finished the first, but who was counting?

  There have always been unwritten rules in journalism, even at the level on which I practice it. Often it is only the fear of a libel suit that stays us from printing a particularly scurrilous story. On Luna the laws are pretty strict on that subject. If you defame someone, you'd better have sources willing to testify before the CC. But more often you hold back on printing something everyone knows for a subtler reason. There is a symbiotic relationship between us and the people we cover. Some would say parasitic, but they don't understand how hungry for publicity a politician or celebrity can be. If we stick to the rules concerning "off the record" statements, things told us on "deep background," and so forth, everybody benefits. I get sources who know I won't betray them, and the subject of my stories gets the public exposure he craves.

  Don't look for the Blind Pig Bar And Grill in your phone memory. Don't expect to find it by wandering the halls of your neighborhood mall. If you should somehow discover its location, don't expect to be let in unless you know a regular who can vouch for you. All I'll say about it is that it's within walking distance of three major movie production studios, and is reached through a door with a totally misleading sign on it.

  The Blind Pig is the place where journalists and movie people can mix without watching their mouths. Like its political counterpart over by City Hall, the Huey P. Long Memorial Gerrymandering Society, you can let your hair down without fear of reading your words in the padloids the next morning-at least, not for attribution. It's the place where gossip, slander, rumor, and

  character assassination are given free rein, where the biggest stars can mix with the lowliest stagehands and the slimiest reporters and not have to watch their tongues. I once saw a grip punch a ten-million-per-picture celebrity in the nose, right there in the Pig. The two fought it out until they were exhausted, went back to the set, and behaved as if nothing had happened. That same punch, thrown in the studio, would have landed the grip on the pavement in microseconds. But if the star had exercised his clout for something that happened in the Pig, and Deep Throat heard about it, the star would not have been welcome again. There's not many places people like that can go and socialize without being bothered. Deep Throat seldom has to banish anyone.

  A reporter once broke confidence with a producer, printed a story told to him in the Pig. He never returned, and he's not a reporter anymore. It's hard to cover the entertainment beat without access to the Pig.

  Places like the Pig have existed since Edison invented Hollywood. The ambiance is dependent on what is shooting that day. Just then there were three popular genres, two rising and one on its way out, and all three were represented around the room. There were warriors from Samurai Japan, taking a break from The Shogun Attacks, currently lensing at Sentry/Sensational Studios. A contingent of people in old-fashioned spacesuits were employed at North Lunar Filmwerks, where I'd heard Return Of The Alphans was behind schedule and over budget and facing an uncertain reception, as the box office for Asteroid Miner/Space Creature films had turned soft in recent months. And a bunch in bandannas, cowboy hats and dirty jeans had to be extras from The Gunslinger V. Westerns were in the middle of their fourth period of filmic popularity, two of them coming in my own lifetime. TG,V, as it was known to the trade, had been doing location work not far from my cabin in West Texas.

  In addition, there were the usual scattering of costumes from other eras, and quite a number of surgically altered gnomes, fairies, trolls, and so forth, working in low-budget fantasy and children's shorts. There was a group of five centaurs from a long-running sci-fi series that should have been axed a dozen Roman numerals ago.

  "Why don't you just move the brain?" I heard Cricket say. "Put it somewhere else, like the stomach?"

  "Oh, brother. Sure, why not? It's been done, of course, but it's not worth the trouble. Nerve tissue is the hardest to manipulate, and the brain? Forget it. There's twelve pairs of cranial nerves you've got to extend through the neck and down to the abdomen, for one thing. Then you have to re-train the gagman-a couple of days, usually-so the time lag doesn't show. And you don't think that matters? Audiences these days, they've seen it all, they're sophisticated. They want realism. We can make a fake brain easy enough and stuff it into the gagman's skull in place of the one we re-located, but audiences will spot the fact that the real brain's not where it's supposed to be."

  I turned on my stool and saw my new friend was sitting on the other side of Cricket, still holding forth about her head shots.

  "Why not just use manikins?" Cricket asked, showing she hadn't spent much time on the entertainment beat. "Wouldn't they be cheaper than real actors?"

  "Sure. A hell of a lot cheaper. Maybe you've never heard of the Job Security Act, or unions."

  "Oh."

  "Damn right. Until a stunt performer dies, we can't replace him with a machine. It's the law. And they die, all right-even with your brain in a steel case, it's a risky profession-but we don't lose more than two or three a year. And there's thousands of them. Plus, they get better at surviving the longer they work, so there's a law of diminishing returns. I can't win." She swiveled, leaned her elbows on the bar, looked out at the tables and sneered.

  "Look at them. You can always spot gagmen. Look for the ones with the vacant faces, like they're wondering where they are. They pick up a piece of shrapnel in the head; we cut away a little brain tissue and replace it with virgin cortex, and they forget a little. Start getting a little vague about things. Go home and can't remember the names of the kids. Back to work the next day, giving me more headaches. Some of 'em have very little left of their original brains, and they'd have to look at their personnel file to tell you where they went to school.

  "And centaurs? I could build you a robot centaur in two days, you couldn't tell it from the real thing. But don't tell the Exotics Guild. No, I get to sign 'em to a five-year contract, surgically convert 'em at great cost to the FX budget, then put 'em through three months of kinesthetic rehab until they can walk without falling on their faces. And what do I get? A stumblebum who can't remember his lines or where the camera is, who can't walk through a scene muttering, for chrissake, without five rehearsals. And at the end of five years, I get to pay to convert 'em back." She reached around and got her drink, which was tall and had little tadpole-like creatures swimming in it. She took a long pull on it, licked her lips. "I tell you, it's a wonder we get any pictures made at all."

  "Nice to see a woman happy in her work," I said. She looked over at me.

  "Hildy," Cricket said, "have you met Princess Saxe-Coburg? She's chief of special effects at NLM."

  "We've met."

  The Princess frowned at me, then recognition dawned. She got off her stool and came toward me, a little unsteady. She put her nose inches from mine.

  "Sure. You pulled out on me a few minutes ago. Not a nice thing to do to a lady."

  At that range, I could see what was odd about her eyes. She was wearing a pair of antique projection contacts, small round flat-TV screens that floated over the cornea. I could make out the ring of solar cells that powered them, and the flyspeck chip that held the memory.
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br />   They'd been introduced just before the Invasion under a variety of trade names, but the one that stuck was Bedroom Eyes. After all, though they could reflect quite a variety of moods, if you were close enough to see the little pictures the mood you were looking for was probably sexual arousal. The more modest models would show a turned-back bed, a romantic scene from an old movie, or even, god help us, waves crashing on a beach. Others made no pretensions, getting right to the erection or spread thighs. Of course, they could reflect other moods, as well, but people were seldom close enough to make them out.

  I'd never seen projection contacts worn by someone quite as stoned as the Princess was. What they were projecting was an interesting illusion: it was as if I were looking through two holes into a hollow head. Remnants of an exploded brain were collapsed at the bottom. Cracks in the skull let in light. And swinging from stray synapses like vines in a jungle were a menagerie of cartoon characters, from Mickey Mouse to Baba Yaga.

  The image disturbed me. I wondered why anyone would want to do that to their brain. From wondering why she would want to, I quickly got to why I would want to, and that was leading me quickly to a place I didn't want to go. So I turned away from her and saw Andrew MacDonald sitting at the other end of the bar like a carrot-topped Hibernian albatross.

  "Did you know she's the Princess of Wales?" Cricket was saying. "She's first in line to the throne of England."

  "And Scotland, and Wales," said the Princess. "Hell, and Ireland, and Canada and India. I might as well re-claim the whole Empire while I'm at it. If my mother ever dies, it'll all belong to me. Of course, there's the little matter of the Invaders."

  "Up the British," Cricket said, and they clinked their glasses together.

  "I met the King once," I said. I drained my drink and slammed it down on the bar. Deep Throat caused it to vanish, and began concocting another.

  "Did you really?"

  "He was a friend of my mother. In fact, he's a possible candidate to be my father. Callie has never told me and never will, but they were friendly together at about the right time. So, if you apply modern laws of bastardy, I might have a claim that supersedes yours." I glanced at MacDonald again. Albatross? Hell, the man was more than a bird of evil omen, more than a stormy petrel or a croaking raven. He was Cassandra. He was a tropical depression, bad breath, a black cat across my path. Everywhere I turned, there he was, a dog humping my leg. He was a ladder in the stocking of my life. He was snake eyes.

  I hated him. I felt like punching him in the nose.

  "Watch what you say," the Princess cautioned. "Remember what happened to Mary, Queen of Scots."

  I punched her in the nose.

  She walked backward a few rubber-legged steps, then sat down on the floor. In the ensuing silence, Cricket whispered in my ear.

  "I think she was kidding," she said.

  For a few moments the whole place was quiet. Everyone was watching us expectantly; they love a good brawl at the Blind Pig. I looked at my clenched fist, and the Princess touched her bloody nose with her hand, then looked at her palm. We both looked up at the same time and our eyes met. And she came off the floor and launched herself at me and started breaking all the bones in my body that she could reach.

  My hitting her had nothing to do with anything she had said or done; at that moment in my life I would have hit anyone standing next to me. But I'd have been a lot better off hitting Cricket. In the Princess of Wales, I'd picked the wrong opponent. She was taller than me and out-massed me. There was probably a ten-centimeter difference in reach between us, and I was on the short end of it. But most importantly, she had spent the last forty years staging cinematic fights, and she knew every trick in the book, and a lot that never got into the book.

  I'm tempted to say I got in two or three good punches. Cricket says I did, but it might have been just to raise my spirits. The truth is I can't remember much from the time her horrid white teeth first filled my vision to the time I ripped a meter-long gash in the carpet with my face.

  To get to the carpet I'd first had to smash through a table full of drinks. I used my face for that, too. Before the table I had been flying, rather cleverly, I thought, and the first real fun I'd had in many long minutes, but how I came to be flying was a point I was never too clear on. It seems safe to say that the Princess hurled me in some manner, holding on to some part of my anatomy and then releasing it; Cricket said it was my ankle, which would account for the room whirling around so quickly just before I flew. Before that I had vague memories of the bar mirror shattering, people scattering, blood spattering. Then I crashed through the table.

  I rolled over and spit out carpeting. Horses were milling nervously all around me. Actually it was the centaur extras, whose table I'd just ruined. I resolved to buy them all a round of drinks. Before I could do that, though, there was the Princess again, lifting me by the shoulder and drawing back a bloody fist.

  Then someone took hold of her arm from behind, and the punch never landed. She stood up and turned to face her challenger. I let my head rest against the ruins of a chair and watched as she tried to punch Andrew MacDonald.

  There was really no point in it. It took her a long time to realize it, as her blood was up and she wasn't thinking straight. So she kept throwing punches, and they kept just missing, or hitting him harmlessly on the elbows or glancing off his shoulders. She tried kicking, and the kicks were always just a little off their target.

  He never threw a punch. He didn't have to. After a time, she was standing there breathing hard. He wasn't even sweating. She straightened and held up her hands, palms outward.

  I must have dozed off for a moment. Eventually I became aware of the Princess, Cricket, and MacDonald, three indistinct round faces hanging above me like a pawnbroker's sign.

  "Can you move your legs?" MacDonald asked.

  "Of course I can move my legs." What a silly question. I'd been moving my legs for a hundred years.

  "Then move them."

  I did, and MacDonald frowned deeper.

  "His back's probably broken," said Wales.

  "Must have happened when he landed on the railing."

  "Can you feel anything?"

  "Unfortunately, yes." By that time most of the drugs were wearing off, and everything from the waist up was hurting very badly. Deep Throat arrived and lifted my head. He had a painkiller in his hand, a little plastic cube with a wire which he plugged into the socket at the base of my skull. He flicked the switch, and I felt a lot better. I looked down and watched as they removed the splintered chair leg which had pierced my hip.

  Since that wasn't a particularly diverting sight, I looked around the room. Already cleaning robots were picking up broken glassware and replacing shattered tables; Deep Throat is no stranger to brawls, and he always keeps a supply of furniture. In another few minutes there would be no sign that I had almost destroyed the place five minutes ago. Well, I had almost destroyed the place, in the sense that it was my hurtling body that had done most of the damage.

  I felt myself being lifted. MacDonald and Wales had made a hammock with their arms. It was like riding in a sedan chair.

  "Where are we going?"

  "You're not in any immediate danger," MacDonald said. "Your back is broken, and that should be fixed soon, so we're taking you across the corridor to the NLF Studios. They have a good repair shop there."

  The Princess got us past the gate guard. We passed about a dozen sound stage doors, and I was brought into the infirmary.

  Which was jammed like Mainhardt's Department Store on Christmas Eve. It seemed NLF was doing a big scene from some war epic, and most of the available beds were taken by maimed extras patiently waiting their turn, counting up the triple-time salary they drew for injured down-time.

  The room had been dressed as a field hospital for the picture, apparently doing double duty when not actually treating cinematic casualties. I pegged it as twentieth century-a vintage season for wars-maybe World War Two, or the Vietnam con
flict, but it could easily have been the Boer War. We were under a canvas roof and the place was cluttered with hanging IV bottle props.

  MacDonald returned from a conference with one of the technicians and stood looking down at me.

  "He says it'll be about half an hour. I could have you taken to your own practitioner if you want to; it might be quicker."

  "Don't bother. I'm in no hurry. When they patch me up, I'll probably just get up and do something foolish again."

  He didn't say anything. There was something about his demeanor that bothered me-as if I needed anything else about him to bother me.

  "Look," I said. "Don't ask me to explain why I did it. I don't even know myself."

  Still he said nothing.

  "Either spit it out, or take your long face and park it somewhere else."

  He shrugged.

  "I just have a problem with a man attacking a woman, that's all."

  "What?" I was sure I had misunderstood him. He wasn't making any sense. But when he didn't repeat his astonishing statement, I had to assume I'd heard him correctly.

  "What does that have to do with anything?" I asked.

  "Nothing, of course. But when I was young, it was something you simply didn't do. I know it no longer makes sense, but it still bothers me to see it."

  "I'll be sure to tell the Mean Bitch you feel that way. If they've put her back together after your last bout, that is."