Steel Beach

by John Varley

He leaned forward, opened his mouth to begin another prepared tirade, but he never got the chance. What I think happened, and the tapes back me up on this, is some of the fresh logs shifted. One of them fell into a pool of the brontosaur fat Callie had poured on, a pool that had been burning on the surface and getting hotter by the minute. The sudden addition of hot coals caused the fat to pop, like it will in a skillet. There was a shower of sparks and all four of us were spattered by tiny droplets of boiling, burning grease that clung like napalm. Since they were mostly quite small, there were just a few sharp pains on my arms and my face, and I quickly slapped them out. Callie and the man with the horns were slapping at themselves as well.

  David had a somewhat larger problem.

  "He's on fire!" prong-head shouted. And it was true. The top of his grass-covered head was burning merrily. David himself wasn't aware of it yet, and looked around in confusion, then stared up with a surprised expression I would always remember, even if it hadn't been shown a hundred times on the news.

  "I need some water," he said, brushing at the flames and hastily drawing his hand back. He seemed calm enough.

  "Here, wait a minute," Callie shouted, and turned toward the beverage cooler. I think she meant to douse him with more beer, and I thought in passing how ironic it was that her throwing the first beer may have saved him having to buy a new face because it had soaked the grass of his beard. "Mario, get him on the ground, try and smother it."

  I didn't comment on her use of my old name. It didn't seem the proper time for it. I started around the fire, reached for David, and he shoved me away. It was purely a panic reaction. I think it had started to hurt by then.

  "Water! Where is the water?"

  "I saw a stream over that way," said prong-head. David looked wildly around. He had become a sinking ship: I saw three voles, a garter snake, and a pair of finches burst from their hiding places, and the fleeing insects were too numerous to count. Some flew directly into the campfire. David behaved no better. He started running in the direction his assistant had pointed, which Mister Fireman could have told him was exactly the wrong thing to do. Either he hadn't paid attention in kindergarten or he'd lost all rational thought. Seeing how brightly he lit up the night, I figured it was the latter.

  "No! David, come back!" Callie had turned from the cooler, having ripped the top from a can of beer. "There's no water that way!" She threw the can after him, but it fell short. David was setting Olympic records in his sprint for the stream that wasn't there. "Mario! Catch him!"

  I didn't think I could, but I had to try. He'd be easy to follow, unless he burned to the ground. I took off, pounding the dirt with my feet, thanking the generations of brontosaurs who had packed it so hard. David had run into a grove of cycadoids and I was just getting to the edge of them when I heard Callie shout again.

  "Come back! Hurry, Mario, come back!" I slowed almost to a stop, and became aware of a disturbing sensation. The ground was shaking. I looked back at the campfire. Callie was standing looking out into the darkness. She'd turned on a powerful hand torch and was sweeping it back and forth. The beam caught a brontosaur in full charge. It stopped, blinded and confused, and then picked a direction at random and rumbled away.

  An eighty-ton shadow thundered by, not three meters to my right. I started moving back to the campfire, scanning the darkness, aware I wouldn't get much warning. Halfway there, another behemoth thundered into the council site. It actually stepped in the fire, which wasn't to its liking at all. It squealed, wheeled, and took off more or less toward me. I watched it coming, figured it would keep moving that way unless stopped by a major mountain chain, and dodged to my left. The beast kept going and was swallowed by the night.

  I knew enough about b-saurs to know not to expect rational behavior from them. They were already upset by the negotiations. Images of t-saurs and feelings of starvation must have addled their tiny brains considerably. It would have taken a lot less stimulus than a burning, screaming David Earth to stampede them. He must have hit them like a stick of dynamite. And when b-saurs panic, what little sense they possess deserts them completely. They start off in random directions. There seems to be an instinct that tends to draw them into a thundering group, eventually headed in the same direction, but they don't see well at night, and thus couldn't easily find each other. The result was seventy or eighty walking mountains going off in all directions. Very little could stand in their way.

  Certainly not me. I hurried to Callie's side. She was talking into a pocket communicator, calling for hovercraft as she stabbed the powerful light beam this way and that. Usually it was enough to turn the beasts. When it was not, we stepped very lively indeed.

  Before long she picked out a medium-sized cow headed more or less in our direction, and turned the beam away from it. She slapped a saur-hook into my hand, and we watched it approach.

  Where's the safest place to be in a dinosaur stampede? On a dinosaur's back. Actually, the best place would have been on one of the hovercraft, whose lights we could see approaching, but you take what you can get. We waited for the hind legs to get past us, dug our hooks into the cow's tail, and swung ourselves up. A dinosaur doesn't precisely like being hooked, but her perceptions of pain that far back on her body are dim and diffused, and this one had other things on her tiny mind. We scrambled up the tail until we could get a grip on the fleshy folds of the back. Don't try this at home, by the way. Callie was an old hand at it, and though I hadn't hooked a saur in seventy years, the skills were still there. I only wobbled for a moment, and Callie was there to steady me.

  So we rode, and waited. In due time the bronto wore herself out, rumbled to a stop, and started cropping leaves from the top of a cycad, probably wondering by now what all the fuss had been about, if she remembered it at all. We climbed down, were met by a hover, and got into that.

  ***

  Callie had the "sun" turned on to aid the search. We found prong-head fairly quickly. He was kneeling in a muddy spot, shaking uncontrollably. He had survived with nothing but luck to aid him. I wondered if he ever loved animals quite so much, or in quite the same way, after that night.

  Say what you will about Callie, her worries for the lad were genuine, and her relief at finding him alive and unhurt was apparent even to him, in his distracted condition. For that matter, though David Earth might call her a cold-blooded killer, she hadn't wished death even on him. She simply measured human life and animal life on different scales, something David could never do.

  "Let's get him out of here and find David," she said, and grabbed the young man by his arm. "He's going to need a lot of medical attention, if he made it." Prong-head resisted, pulling away from her grasp, remaining on his knees. He pointed down into the mud. I looked, and then looked away.

  "David has returned to the food-chain," he said, and fainted.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The next several days were fairly hectic for me. I was kept so busy I had little time to think or worry about the CC or entertain thoughts of suicide. The whole idea seemed completely alien.

  Since I work for a print medium I tend not to think in terms of pictures. My stories are meant to be written, transmitted to a subscriber-rented scrambler-equipped newspad, where they will be screened and read by that part of the population that still reads. Walter employs others to shorten, simplify, and read aloud his reporters' stories for the illit channel of the newspad. There are of course all-visual news services, and now there is direct interface, but so far at least, D.I. is not something most people do for relaxation and entertainment. Reading is still the preferred method of information input for a large minority of Lunarians. It is slower than D.I., but much quicker and in much greater depth than pure television news.

  But the News Nipple is an electronic medium, and many of the stories we run come with film clips. Thus did the newspaper manage to find a government-subsidized, yearly more perilous niche for itself in the era of television. Pundits keep predicting the death of the newspad, and yea
r by year it struggles on, maintained mostly by people who don't want too much change in their lives.

  I tend to forget about the holocam in my left eye. Its contents are dumped at the same time I enter my story into the Nipple's editorial computer, and a picture editor usually fast-forwards through it and picks a still shot or a few seconds of moving images to back up my words. I remember when it was first installed I worried that those editors would be seeing things that I'd prefer to be private; after all, the thing operates all the time, and has a six-hour memory. But the CC had assured me there was a discrimination program in the main computer that erased all the irrelevant pictures before a human ever saw them. (Now it occurred to me to wonder about that. It had never bothered me that the CC might see the full tapes, but I'd never thought of him as a snoop before.)

  The holocam is a partly mechanical, partly biologic device about the size of a fingernail clipping that is implanted inside the eye, way over to one side, out of the way of your peripheral vision. A semi-silvered mirror is hung in the middle of the eye, somewhere near the focal point, and reflects part of the light entering the eye over to the holocam. When you first have one put in you notice a slight diminution of light sensitivity in that eye, but the brain is such that it quickly adjusts and in a few days you never notice it again. It causes my pupil to look red, and it glows faintly in the dark.

  It had been operating when David Earth caught fire, naturally. I didn't even think of it during subsequent events, not until David's body had been removed and taken to wherever Earthists are disposed of. Then I realized I had what might be the biggest story of my career. And a scoop, as well.

  Real death captured by a camera is always guaranteed to make the front feed of the newspad. The death of a celebrity would provide fodder for Walter's second-string feature writers for months to come; anything to have an excuse to run once more that glorious, horrible image of David's head wreathed in fire, and the even more horrifying results of being crushed beneath a stampeding brontosaur.

  News footage is exclusive to the paper that filmed it for a period of twenty-four hours. After that, there is a similar period when it may be leased for minutes or hours, or sold outright. After forty-eight hours it all becomes public domain.

  A major metropolitan newspaper is geared to exploit these two critical periods to the utmost. For the first day, when we could exploit my film exclusively, we made the death of Earth seem like the biggest story since the marriage of Silvio and Marina twenty-five years ago, or their divorce one year later, or the Invasion of the Planet Earth, take your pick. Those are commonly thought to be the three biggest news stories of all time, the only real difference in their magnitude being that two of them were well-covered, and one was not. This story was nowhere near that big, of course, but you'd never have known it to read our breathless prose and listen to our frantic commentators.

  I was the center of much of this coverage. There was no question of sleeping. Since I'm not an on-screen personality-which means I'm an indifferent speaker, and the camera does not love me-I spent most of the time sitting across from our star anchor and answering his questions. Most of this was fed out live, and often took as much as fifteen minutes at the top of each hour. For the next fifteen minutes we showed the reports sent back by the cadres of camerapeople who descended on Callie's ranch and shot everything from pictures of the killer dinosaur's bloody foot, to the corpses of the three b-saurs killed in the stampede, to the still-vivid imprint of David's body in the mud, to interviews with every ranch hand who'd ever worked for Callie, even though none of them had seen anything but the dead body.

  I thought Walter was going to explode when he learned that Callie refused to be interviewed under any circumstances or for any amount of money. He sent me to the ranch to cajole her. I went, knowing it would do no good. He threatened to have her arrested; in his rage, he seemed to believe that refusing to cooperate with the media-and with him in particular-was illegal. For her part, Callie made several nasty calls demanding that we stop using her image, and someone had to read her the relevant parts of the law that said she couldn't do anything about it. She rang me up and called me a Judas, among other things. I don't know what she expected me to do with the biggest story of my life; sit on it, I guess. I called her a few things back, just as harsh. I think she was concerned about her possible liability in the incident, but the main reason was her loathing for the popular press-something I couldn't entirely disagree with her on. I have wondered, from time to time, if that's why I got into this business. Nasty thought, that.

  Anyway, I decided it would be pointless to seek her advice on the parts of my story I hadn't gotten around to telling her, for at least a year or so. Make that five years.

  The next day was spent farming the story out to competing rags and vids, but on our terms. The price was high, but willingly paid. They knew that next time they were as likely to be on the selling end, and would gouge appropriately. As was standard practice, I was always included as part of the deal, so I could mention the Nipple as often and as blatantly as possible while on live feeds. So I talked myself into a sore throat sitting beside endless commentators, columnists, and similar sorts, while the by now dated footage ran yet another time.

  The only person who got as much exposure as I did during those two days was Eartha Lowe. A movement as radical as the Earthists will spawn splinter groups like a sow whelps piglets. It's a law of nature. Eartha was the leader of the largest one, also called the Earthists, purely to give headaches to poor newspapermen, I'm convinced. Some of us distinguished them as Earthist(David) and Earthist(Lowe), others tried the abomination of Eartha-ists. Most of us simply called them the Earthists and the Other Earthists, something guaranteed to provoke a wailing woodnote wild from Eartha, because there was no need to explain who the "Others" were.

  David had died politically intestate. There was no heir apparent in his organization. Increasingly, people were not planning for their own deaths, because they simply didn't expect to die. Perhaps that explains the mordant fascination with violent images in popular entertainment and the clamor for more details about real deaths when they occur. We haven't achieved immortality yet. Maybe we never will. People are reassured to see death as something that happens to somebody else, and not often at that.

  Eartha Lowe was standing on every soapbox that would support her not-inconsiderable weight, welcoming the strays back into the fold. In her version, it was David who had split away. Who cared that he had taken ninety percent of the flock with him? We were told that Eartha had always loved David (no surprise; they had both professed to love every living creature, though David had loved Eartha more on the level of, say, a nematode or a virus, not so much as the family dog) and Eartha had returned his affection in spades. I couldn't follow all the doctrinal differences. The big one seemed to be Eartha's contention that any proper Earthist should be in the female image, to be a mirror of Mother Earth. Or something like that.

  All in all, it was the goldarndest, Barnum-and-Baileyest, rib-stickinest, rough-and-tumblest infernal foofaraw of a media circus anybody had seen since grandpaw chased the possum down the road and lost his store teeth, and I was heartily sorry to have been a part of it.

  When the two-day purgatory was over, I collapsed into my bed for twelve hours. When I woke up, I gave some thought once more to getting out of the business. Was it a root cause of my self-destructive tendencies? One would have to think that hating what I did might contribute to feelings of worthlessness, and thus to thoughts of ending it all. I tabled the matter for the moment. I have to admit that though I may feel disdain for the things we do and the manner in which we do them, there is a heady thrill to the news business when things are really happening. Not that exciting things happen all that often, even in my line of work. Most news is of the not-much-happened-today variety, tricked up in various sexy lies. But when it does happen, it's exhilarating. And there's an even guiltier pleasure in being where things are happening, in being the first to know s
omething. About the only other line of work where you can get as close to the center of things is politics, and even I draw the line at that. I have some standards left.

  Talking to Callie had been a bust, advice-wise if not career-wise. But in searching for sources of dissatisfaction one thing had grown increasingly clear to me. I was wearing my body like a badly fitted pair of trousers, the kind that bind you in the crotch. A year as a female, ersatz though the experience had been, had shown me it was time for a Change. Past time, probably by several years.

  Could that have been the fountain of my discontent? Could it have been a contributing factor? Doubtful, and possibly. Even if it had nothing to do with it, it wouldn't hurt to go ahead and get it done, so I could be comfortable again. Hell, it was no big deal.

  ***

  When the terribly, terribly fashionable decide the old genitals are getting to be rather a bore, don't you know, they phone the chauffeur and have the old bones driven down to Change Alley.

  Normally, when it came time for a Change, I would hie me to some small neighborhood operation. They are all board-certified, after all, one just as able as another to do the necessary nipping and tucking. A confluence of circumstances this time decided me to visit the street where the elite meet. One was that my pockets were bulging with the shekels Walter had showered on me in the form of bonuses for the Burning Earth story. The other was that I knew Darling Bobbie when he was just Robert Darling of Crazy Bob's Budget Barbering and Tattoo Parlor, back when he did sex changes as a sideline to bring in more money. He'd had a little shop on the Leystrasse, a determinedly working-class commercial corridor with a third of the shopfronts boarded up and plastered with handbills, running through one of the less fashionable neighborhoods of King City. He'd been sandwiched between a bordello and a taco stand, and his sign had read "Finast Gender Alteration On The Leystrasse-E-Z Credit Terms." None of which was news to anyone: his was the only Change shop in the area, and you couldn't offer so expensive a service around there without being prepared to finance. Not that he did a lot of it. Laborers can't afford frequent sex changes and, as a group, are not that inclined to question Mother Nature's toss of the dice, much less flit back and forth from one sex to the other. He did much better with the tattooing, which was cheap and appealed to his clientele. He told me he had regulars who had their entire bodies done every few weeks.