Steel Beach

by John Varley

  "Are you all right?" Brenda asked. "The medico said you might behave oddly for a few minutes."

  "Was I turning in circles?"

  "No, you were just standing there, looking a million miles away."

  "I was interfacing," I said, and she nodded, as if that explained it all. And I suppose it did, to her. Though she'd never been to Scarpa Island or any place as completely real as that, she understood interfacing a lot better than I did, having done it all her life. I decided not to ask her if she felt the sand floor her feet seemed to be planted in; I knew it was unlikely. I doubted she saw the seagulls that circled near the ceiling, either.

  I felt a terrible urge to get out of there. Shaking off Wales' offer of apologies and a drink, I headed for the studio gate. The sand didn't end until I was back in the public corridors, where I finally stepped up onto good old familiar floor tiles, soft and resilient under my bare feet. I was male again, and this time noticed it right away. When I turned around, the sand that should have been behind me was gone.

  But on the way to Texas I saw many tropical plants growing from the concrete floors, and I rode in a tube car festooned with vines and crawling with land crabs. Usually you have to ingest a great deal of a very powerful chemical to see scenes like that, I reflected, watching the crabs scuttle around my feet. It wasn't something I was eager to do again soon.

  And it took a full day for the new cocoanut palm I found shading my half-built cabin to vanish in the night.

  ***

  The lantern I carried didn't cast a lot of light. A bright light in the darkness could upset the stock, so Callie provided her hands with these antique devices which burned a smoky oil refined from reptilian fat. It was enough to keep me from stumbling over tree roots, but not to see very far ahead. And of course if you looked at the light, your night vision was destroyed. I told myself not to look, then the cantankerous thing would sputter and I'd glance at it, and stop in my tracks, blinded. So when I encountered the first unusual tree trunk I didn't realize what it was, at first. I touched it and felt the warmth, and knew I'd bumped into a brontosaur's hind leg. I backed hastily away. The beasts are clumsy and inclined to stampede if startled. And if you've ever been unpleasantly surprised by a package from a passing pigeon in the city park, you don't want to find out what can happen to you in the area of a brontosaur's hind leg, believe me. I speak from bitter experience.

  I picked my way through a forest of similar trunks until I spotted a small campfire in a hollow. Three figures were seated around the fire, two side by side, and another-Callie-across from them. I could dimly see the hulking shadows of a dozen brontosaurs, darker shapes against the night, placidly chewing their cuds and farting like foghorns. I approached the fire slowly, not wanting to startle anybody, and still managed to surprise Callie, who looked up in alarm, then patted the ground beside her. She held her finger to her lips, then resumed her study of her adversaries, painted orange by the dancing flames between us.

  I've never decided if David Earth looked spookier in a setting like this, or in the full light of day-for it was him, the Spokesmammal himself, sitting in lotus position, a walking, talking inducement for the purchase of hay fever remedies. Callie was actually allergic to the man, or to his biosphere, and though a cure would have been simple and cheap she cherished her malady, she treasured it, she happily endured every sneeze and sniffle as one more reason to detest him. She'd hated him since before I was born, and viewed his five-yearly appearances the same way people must have felt about dental extractions before anesthetics.

  He nodded to me, and I nodded back. That seemed conversation enough for both of us. Callie and I didn't agree on a lot of things, but we shared the same opinion of David Earth and all the Earthists.

  He was a large man, almost as tall as Brenda and much heftier. His hair was long, green, and unkept for a very good reason: it wasn't hair, but a bioengineered species of grass bred to be parasitic on human skin. I don't know the details of its cultivation. I'd have had more interest in the mating habits of toads. It involved a thickening of the scalp, and soil was involved-when he scratched his head, dirt showered down. But I don't know how the soil was attached, whether in pockets or layered on the skin, and I don't know anything about the blood-to-root system, and I'd just as soon not, thank you. I remember as a child wondering if, when he got up in the morning, he had to work compost into his agri-tonsorial splendor.

  He had two huge breasts-almost all Earthists, male and female, sported them-and more plants grew on their upper slopes. Many of these bore tiny flowers or fruits. I wondered if he had to practice contour plowing to prevent erosion on those fertile hillsides. He saw me looking at them, plucked an apple no bigger than a grape from the tangled mass, and popped it in his mouth.

  What can one say about the rest of him? His back and arms and legs were covered with hair. Not human hair, but actual pelts, resembling in various patches jaguar, tiger, bison, zebra, and polar bear, among others, in a crazy patchwork. The genetic re-structuring required to support all that must have been a cut-and-paste collage beyond imagining. It was ironic, I thought, that the roots of the Earthists were in the anti-fur activists, but of course no animals had been harmed to produce his pelt. Just little bits of their genes snipped out and shoehorned into his. He had claws like a bear on his fingertips, and instead of feet he walked around on the hooves of a moose, like some large economy-size faun. All Earthists had animal attributes, it was their badge and ensign. But their founder had gone further than any of his followers. Which, one suspects, is what makes followers and leaders.

  But, incredible as it may seem having gone through the catalog of his offenses to the eye, it must be said that the first thing one noticed about David Earth upon having the misfortune to encounter him was his smell.

  I'm sure he bathed. Perhaps the right way of putting it was that he watered himself regularly. David Earth during a drought would have been a walking fire hazard. But he used no soap (animal by-product) or any other cleaning preparation (chemical pollution of the David-sphere). All of which would simply have resulted in a smell of sour sweat, which I don't care for but can tolerate. No, it was his passengers that lifted his signature aroma from the merely objectionable to the realm of the unimaginable.

  Large animals with fur harbor fleas, that's axiomatic. Fleas were only the beginning of David Earth's "welcome guests," as he'd once described them to me. I'd countered with another term, parasites, and he'd merely smiled benevolently. All his smiles were benevolent; he was that kind of guy, the sort whose kindly face you'd like to rip off and feed to his welcome guests. David was the kind of guy who had all the moral answers, and never hesitated to point out the error of your ways. Lovingly, of course. He loved all nature's creatures, did David, even one as low on the evolutionary ladder as youself.

  What sort of guests did David spread his filthy welcome mat for? Well, what sort of vermin live in grasslands? I'd never seen a prairie dog peeking from his coiffure, but I wouldn't have been surprised. He was home to a scamper of mice, a shriek of shrews, a twittering of finches, and a circus of fleas. A trained biologist could easily have counted a dozen species of insects without even getting close. All these creatures were born, reared, courted, mated, nested, ate, defecated, urinated, laid their eggs, fought their battles, stalked their prey, dreamed their dreams and, as must we all, eventually died in the various biomes that were David. Sometimes the carcasses fell out; sometimes they didn't. All more fertile soil for the next generation.

  All Earthists stink; it goes with the territory. They are perennial defendants in civil court for violation of the body odor laws, hauled in when some long-suffering citizen on a crowded elevator finally decides he's had enough. David Earth was the only man I knew of in Luna who was permanently banished from the public corridors. He made his way from ranch to disneyland to hydroponic farm by way of the air, water, and service ducts.

  "My membership is alarmed if that is your best offer," said David's companion, a much
smaller, much less prepossessing fellow whose only animal attributes I could see were a modest pair of pronghorn antlers and a lion's tail. "One hundred murders is nothing but wanton slaughter, and we totally reject it. But after careful consultation, we're prepared to offer eighty. With the greatest reluctance."

  "Eighty harvested," Callie leaned on the word, as she always did. "Eighty is simply ridiculous. I'll go broke with a quota of eighty. Come on, let's go up to my office right now, I'll show you the books, there's an order of seventy carcasses from McDonald's alone."

  "That's your problem; you should never have signed the contract until these negotiations were concluded."

  "Don't sign the contract, I lose the customer. What do you want to do, ruin me? Ninety-nine, that's my absolutely no-fooling final offer; take it or leave it. I don't think I can turn a profit even with a hundred, it'll be touch and go. But to get this over with… I'll tell you what. Ninety-eight. That's twelve less than what you gave Reilly, just down the road, not three days ago, and his herd's smaller than mine."

  "We're not here to discuss Reilly, we're talking about your contract, and your herd. And your herd is not a happy herd, I've heard nothing but grievances from them. I simply can't allow one more murder than…" He glanced at David, who shook his head barely enough to disturb a single amber wave of grain. "Eighty," pronghorn-head concluded.

  Callie seethed silently for a while. There was no hope of talking to her just yet, not until the unionists repaired for consultations with their clients, so I moved back from the fire a little. Something about the bargaining process had struck me as relevant to my situation.

  "CC," I whispered. "Are you there?"

  "Where else would I be?" the CC murmured softly in my ear. "And you only need to sub-vocalize; I'll pick up your words easily enough."

  "How would I know where you'd be? When I called for you after you rowed away from me, you didn't answer. I thought you might be sulking."

  "I didn't think it would be profitable for either of us to discuss what I'd just told you until you'd had time to think it over."

  "I have, and I've got a few questions."

  "I'll do my best to answer them."

  "These union reps. Are they really speaking for the dinosaurs?"

  There was a medium-sized pause. I guess the question did seem irrelevant to the issue at hand. But the CC withheld comment on that.

  "You grew up on this ranch. I'd have thought you would know the answer to that question."

  "No, that's just it. I've never really thought about it. You know Callie's feelings about animal rights. She told me the Earthists were nothing but a bunch of mystics who had enough political clout to get their crazy ideas put into law. She said she had never believed they actually communed with the animals. I believed her, and I haven't thought about it for seventy, eighty years. But after what I've just been through, I wonder if she's right."

  "She's mostly wrong," the CC said. "That animals feel things is easily demonstrable, even down at the level of protozoans. That they have what you would recognize as thoughts is more debatable. But since I am a party to these negotiations-an indispensable party, I might add-I can tell you that, yes, these creatures are capable of expressing desires and responding to propositions, so long as they are expressed in terms they understand."

  "How?"

  "Well… the contract that will eventually be hammered out here is entirely a human instrument. These beasts will never be aware of its existence. Since their 'language' is confined to a few dozen trumpeted calls, it is quite beyond their capacity. But the provisions of the contract will be arrived at by a give-and-take process not unlike human collective bargaining. Callie has injected all her stock with a solution of water and some trillions of self-replicating nano-engineered biotropic mechanisms that-"

  "Nanobots."

  "Yes, that's the popular term."

  "You have something against popular terms?"

  "Only their imprecision. The term 'nanobot' means a very small self-propelled programmed machine, and that includes many other varieties of intracellular devices than the ones currently under discussion. The ones in your bloodstream and within your body cells are quite different-"

  "Okay, I see what you mean. But it's the same principle, right? These little robots, smaller than red blood cells…"

  "Some are much smaller than that. They are drawn to specific sites within an organism and then they go to work. Some carry raw materials, some carry blueprints, some are the actual construction workers. Working at molecular speeds, they build various larger machines-and by larger, you understand, I still mean microscopic, in most cases-in the interstices between the body cells, or within the cell walls themselves."

  "Which are used for…"

  "I think I see where you're going with this. They perform many functions. Some are housekeeping chores that your own body is either not good at, or has lost the capacity to do. Others are monitoring devices that alert a larger, outside system that something is going wrong. In Callie's herd, that is a Mark III Husbander, a fairly basic computer, not significantly altered in design for well over a century."

  "Which is a part of you, naturally."

  "All computers in Luna except abaci and your fingers are a part of me. And in a pinch, I could use your fingers."

  "As you've just shown me."

  "Yes. The machine… or I, if you prefer, listens constantly through a network of receivers placed around the ranch, just as I listen constantly for your calls to me, no matter where you are in Luna. This is all on what you might think of as my subconscious level. I'm never aware of the functioning of your body unless I'm alerted by an alarm, or if you call me on-line."

  "So the network of machines that's in my body, there's one like it in each of Callie's brontosaurs."

  "Related to it, yes. The neural structures are orders of magnitude less evolved than the ones in your brain, just as your organic brain is superior in operation to that of the dinosaur. I don't run any parasitic programs in the dinosaur brain, if that's what you mean."

  I didn't think it was what I meant, but I wasn't completely sure, since I wasn't completely sure why I'd asked about this in the first place. But I didn't tell the CC that. He went on.

  "It is as close to mental telepathy as we're likely to get. The union representatives are tuned into me, and I'm tuned into the dinosaurs. The negotiator poses a question: 'How do you fellows feel about 120 of your number being harvested/murdered this year?' I put the question in terms of predators. A picture of an approaching tyrannosaur. I get a fear response: 'Sorry, we'd rather not, thank you.' I relay it to the unionist, who tells Callie the figure is not acceptable. The unionist proposes another number, in tonight's case, sixty. Callie can't accept that. She'd go broke, there would be no one to feed the stock. I convey this idea to the dinosaurs with feelings of hunger, thirst, sickness. They don't like this either. Callie proposes 110 creatures taken. I show them a smaller tyrannosaur approaching, with some of the herd escaping. They don't respond quite so strongly with the fear and flight reflex, which I translate as 'Well, for the good of the herd, we might see our way clear to losing seventy so the rest can grow fat.' I put the proposal to Callie, who claims the Earthists are bleeding her white, and so on."

  "Sounds totally useless to me," I said, with only half my mind on what the CC had been saying. I was seeing a vision of myself living within the planet-girdling machine that the CC had become, and of him living within my body as well. The funny thing was that nothing I'd learned since arriving at Scarpa Island had been exactly new to me. There were new, unheralded capabilities, but looking at them, I could see they were inherent in the technology. I'd had the facts, but not enough of them. I'd spent almost no time thinking about them, any more than I thought about breathing, and even less time considering the implications, most of which I didn't like. I realized the CC was talking again.

  "I don't see why you should say that. Except that I know your moral stand on the whole issue of animal
husbandry, and you have a right to that."

  "No, that whole issue aside, I could have told you how this all would come out, given only the opening bid. David proposed sixty, right?"

  "After the opening statement about murdering any of these creatures at all, and his formal demand that all-"

  "'-creatures should live a life free from the predation of man, the most voracious and merciless predator of all,' yeah, I've heard the speech, and David and Callie both know it's just a formality, like singing the planetary anthem. When they got down to cases, he said sixty. Man, he must really be angry about something, sixty is ridiculous. Anyway, when she heard sixty, Callie bid 120 because she knew she had to slaughter ninety this year to make a reasonable profit, and when David heard that he knew they'd eventually settle on ninety. So tell me this: why bother to consult the dinosaurs? Who cares what they think?"

  The CC was silent, and I laughed.

  "Tell the truth. You make up the images of meat-eaters and the feelings of starvation. I presume that when the fear of one balances out the fear of the other, when these poor dumb beasts are equally frightened by lousy alternatives-in your judgement, let's remember… well, then we have a contract, right? So where would you conjecture that point will be found?"

  "Ninety carcasses," the CC said.

  "I rest my case."

  "You have a point. But I actually do transmit the feelings of the animals to the human representatives. They do feel the fear, and can judge as well as I when a balance is reached."

  "Say what you will. Me, I'm convinced the jerk with the horns could have as easily stayed in bed, signed a contract for ninety kills, and saved a lot of effort. Then prong-head could look for useful work. Maybe as a gardener in David's hair-do."

  There was a long silence from the CC. When he spoke again it was in a different tone of voice from his usual lecturing mode.