Steel Beach

by John Varley

  He told me, and if he'd said anything else I don't think I'd have gotten out of the jumper. But it made just enough sense, and he sounded just scared enough. Hell, Walter sounding scared at all was a new one on me, and did not fail to make an impression.

  But I was still balanced there on the edge, wondering if he'd force me if I simply stayed put, when he grabbed me by the neck and pulled me over to him and kissed me on the cheek. I was too surprised to struggle.

  He let me go immediately, and turned away.

  "You… ah, are you due soon? Will that be-"

  "Another ten days yet," I told him. "It won't be a problem." Or it shouldn't be, unless… "Unless you think I'll have to hide for-"

  "I don't think so," he said. "I'll try to contact you in three days. In the meantime, keep your head down. Don't try to contact anyone. Stay a week, if you have to. Stay nine days."

  "On the tenth I'm damn sure coming out," I told him.

  "I'll have something else by then," he promised. "Now go."

  I stepped into the lock, cycled it, felt the null-suit switch itself on. I climbed down onto the plain and watched the jumper leap into the sky and dwindle toward the horizon.

  Before I even strapped on the backpack bottle I reached up and felt Walter's tear still warm on my cheek.

  ***

  I'm not sure how far Walter dropped me from my final destination. Something on the order of twenty, thirty kilometers. I didn't think it would be a problem.

  I covered the first ten in the long, side-legged stride that Earth-bred leg muscles can produce in Lunar gravity, the gait that, except for bicycles, is the most energy-efficient transportation known to man. And if you think you can eat up the distance that way in an ordinary pressure suit, try it in a null-suit. You practically fly.

  But don't do it pregnant. Before long my tummy started feeling funny, and I slowed down, doing nervous calculations about oxygen and distance as I began to get into territory that looked familiar to me.

  I reached the old air lock with three hours of spare air, dead on my feet. I think I actually catnapped a few times there, waking up only as I was about to fall on my face, consulting the compass as I wiped my eyes, getting back on the proper bearing. Luckily, by the time that started happening I was on ground I knew.

  I had a bad moment when the lock didn't seem to want to cycle for me. Could it be this place had been sealed off in the last seventy years? It had been that long since I used it. Of course, there were other locks I knew in the area, but Walter had said it was too dangerous to use them. But use them I would, rather than die out here on the surface. It was with that thought that the cantankerous old machinery finally engaged and the lock drum rotated. I stepped inside, cycled, and hurried into the elevator, which deposited me in a little security cubicle. I punched the letters M-A-R-I-A-X-X-X. Somewhere not too far away, an old lady would be noting the door was in use. If Walter was right, that information would not be relayed on to the Central Computer.

  There's no place like home, I thought, as I stepped into the dimness and familiar rotten odor of a Cretaceous rain forest.

  I was in a distant corner of the dino-ranch where I had grown up. Callie's ranch. It had always been hers, the Double-C Bar brand, never a thought of the C amp;M or anything like that. Not that I'd wanted it, but it would have been nice to feel like more than a hired hand. Now let's not get into that.

  But this particular corner-and I wondered how Walter had known this-I'd always thought of as Maria's Cavern. There really was a cave in it, just a few hundred meters from where I now stood, and I had made it into my playhouse when I was very young and still known as Maria Cabrini.

  So it was to Maria's Cavern I now went, and in Maria's Cavern that I desultorily scraped together a mat of dry moss to lie down on, and on the canvas bag Walter had given me that I intended to rest my head and sleep for at least a week, only I never saw if my head actually made it there because I fell asleep as my head was on the way down.

  I actually did get about three hours' sleep. I know, because I checked the clock in my head-up display when the first labor pain woke me up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  If theoretical physics and mathematics had been the realm of females, the human race would have reached the stars long ago.

  I base this contention on personal experience. No dedicated male could ever have the proper insight into the terrible geometry of parturition. Faced with the problem of making an object of size X appear on the other side of an opening of size X/2, and armed with the knowledge to enable her to view it as a problem in topology or Lobachevskian geometry, I feel sure one of the billions of women in the thrall of labor would have had an insight involving multiple dimensions on hyperspace if only to make it stop hurting. FTL travel would have been a cinch. As for Einstein, some woman a thousand years his junior could easily have discovered the mutability of time and space, if only she had the tools. Time is relative? Hah! Eve could have told you that. Take a deep breath and bear down, honey, for about thirty seconds or an eternity, whichever comes last.

  I didn't describe the injuries I received on my second Direct Interface with the Central Computer for a lot of reasons. One is that pain like that can't be described. Another: the human mind doesn't remember pain well, one of the few things God got right. I know it hurt; I can't recall how much it hurt, but I'm pretty sure giving birth hurt more, if only because it never seemed to stop. For these reasons, and others involving what privacy one can muster in this open age, I will not have much to say here about the process about which God had this to say in Genesis 3, verse sixteen: "I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception, in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children…" All this for swiping one stinking apple?

  I went into labor. I continued laboring for the next thousand years, or well into that same evening.

  There are no real excuses for most of my ignorance of the process. I'd seen enough old movies and should have remembered the-mostly comic-scenes where the blessed event arrives ahead of schedule. In my defense I can only plead a century of ordered life, a life wherein when a train was supposed to arrive at 8:17:15 it damn well arrived at 8:17:15. In my world postal service is fast, cheap, and continuous. You expect your parcels to arrive across town within fifteen minutes, and around the planet in under an hour. When you place an interplanetary call, the phone company had better not plead a solar storm is screwing things up; we expect them to do something about it, and they do. We are so spoiled by good service, by living in a world that works, that the most common complaint received by the phone company-and I'm talking thousands of nasty letters each year-concerns the time lag when calling Aunt Dee-Dee on Mars. Don't give me this speed-of-light shit, we whine; get my call through.

  That's why I was caught off-guard by the first contraction. The little bastard wasn't due for two weeks yet. I knew it had always been possible that it would start early, but then I'd have phoned the doctor and he'd have mailed me a pill and put a stop to that. And on the proper day I'd have walked in and another pill would have started the process and I could have read a book or watched the pad or graded papers until they handed me the suitably cleaned and powdered and swaddled and peacefully sleeping infant. Sure, I knew how it used to be, but I was suffering from a delusion that most of you probably share with me. I thought I was immune, damn it. We put all this behind us when we started hatching our kids out of bottles, didn't we? If our minds know this, how would our bodies dare to betray us? I felt all these things in spite of recent events, which should have taught me that the world didn't have to be as orderly a place as I had thought it was.

  So my uterus declared its independence, first with a little twitch, then with a spasm, and in no time at all in a tidal wave of hurting like the worst attack of constipation since the fellow tried to shit that proverbial brick.

  I'm no hero, and I'm no stoic. After the fortieth or fiftieth wave I decided a quick death would be preferable to this, so I got up and walked out of the cave with
the intention of turning myself in. How bad could it be? I reasoned. Surely me and the CC could work something out.

  But because I'm no heroic stoic, my life was saved; after the forty-first or fifty-first pain threw me down to grovel in the dirt, I did a little arithmetic and figured I'd have about three hundred contractions before I reached the nearest exit, so I stumbled back to the cave as soon as I could walk again, figuring I'd prefer to die in there than out in the mud.

  I used the decreasing periods of rationality between pains to think back to my only source of folk wisdom in the matter of childbirth: those good old movies. Not the black and white ones. If you watch those you might come to believe babies were brought by the stork, and pregnant women never got fat. You would surely have to conclude that birthing didn't muss your hair and your make-up. But in the late twentieth there were some movies that showed the whole ghastly process. Recalling them made me even queasier. Hell, some of those women died. I brought back scenes of hemorrhage, forceps delivery, and episiotomy, and knew that wasn't the half of it.

  But there were constants in the process of normal birth, which was about all I could plan for, so I set about doing that. I rummaged in Walter's rucksack and found bottled water, gauze, disinfectants, thread, a knife. I laid them out beside me like a grisly home surgery kit lacking only the anesthetic. Then I waited to die.

  ***

  That's the bad side of it. There was another side. Let's just skip over fevered descriptions of the grunting and groaning, of the stick I bit in half while bearing down, of the blood and slime. A moment came when I could reach down and feel his little head down there. It was a moment balanced between life and death. Maybe as near to a perfect moment as I ever experienced, and for reasons I've never quite been able to describe. The pain was still there, maybe even at a peak. But continual pain finally exerts its own anesthetic; maybe neural circuit breakers trip, or maybe you just learn to absorb the pain in a new way. Maybe you learn to accept it. I accepted it at that moment, as my fingers traced the tiny facial features and I felt his tiny mouth opening and closing. For a few more seconds he was still a part of my body.

  At that moment I first experienced mother love. I didn't want to lose him. I knew I'd do anything not to lose him.

  Oh, I wanted him to come out, right enough… and yet a part of me wanted to remain poised in that moment. Relativity. Pain and love and fear and life and death moving at the speed of light, slowing time down to the narrow focus of that one perfect moment, my womb the universe, and everything outside of it suddenly inconsequential.

  I had not loved him before. I had not delighted to feel him kick and squirm. I admit it: I had not entered into this pregnancy with anything like adult care and consideration, and right up to the last week had viewed the fetus as a parasite I might well be rid of. The only reason I didn't get rid of it was my extreme state of confusion regarding life in general, and my own purpose in it in particular. Since trying with such determination to end my life, I had simply been sitting back and letting things happen to me. The baby was just one of those things.

  Then the moment slipped by and he slipped out and was in my hands and I did the things mothers do. I've since wondered if I'd have known what to do without the memory of those dramatic scenes and sex education classes eight or nine decades before. You know what? I almost think I would have.

  At any rate, I cleaned him, and dealt with the umbilicus, and counted his fingers and toes and wrapped him in a towel and held him to my breast. He didn't cry very much. Outside the cave a warm prehistoric rain was falling through the giant ferns, and a bronto bellowed in the distance. I lay exhausted, strangely contented, smelling my own milk for the first time. When I looked down at him I thought he smiled at me with his screwed-up, toothless monkey face, and when I offered him a finger to play with his little hand grabbed it and held on tight. I felt love swell in my bosom.

  See what he'd done to me? He had me using words like bosom.

  Three days went by, and no Walter. A week, and still no word.

  I didn't care much. Walter had brought me to the one place in Luna where I could survive and even thrive. There were fish in the stream and there was fruit and nuts on the trees. Not pre-historic flora and fauna; aside from the dinos and the big cycadaceous trees and ferns and shrubs they ate, the CC Ranch was furnished with completely modern life-forms. There were no trilobites in the water, mainly because nobody had ever found a way to turn a profit on trilobites. Instead, there were trout and bass, and I knew how to catch them. There were apple and pecan trees, and I knew where to find them because I'd planted a lot of them myself. There were no predators to speak of. Callie had just the one tyrannosaur, and he was kept penned up and fed bronto scraps. For that one week I led a sort of pastoral ideal cave-girl life I doubt any of our Paleolithic ancestors would have recognized. I didn't think about it much.

  I didn't think much about Callie, either. She didn't show up to see her new grandson. I don't blame her for that, because she didn't even know he had been conceived, much less hatched, and even if she had known she wouldn't have dared visit us because she might have led the CC to my hiding place.

  That's what saved us: Callie's long-standing refusal to link into the planetary data net, a bull-headed stance for which everyone she knew had derided her. I had been one of them. I remember in my teens, presenting her with a cost-benefit analysis I'd carefully prepared that I felt sure would convince her to give in to "progress," knowing full well that a financial argument was most likely to carry weight with her. She'd studied it for about a minute, then tossed it aside. "We'll have no government spies in the Double-C Bar," she said, and that was the end of that. We stayed with our independent computer system, keeping interfaces with the CC to a minimum, and as a result I could venture out of my cave and gather my fruits and nuts without worrying about paternalistic eyes watching from the roof. The rest of Luna was in turmoil now. Callie's Ranch was unaffected; she simply pulled in her arms and her head like a turtle and sat down to wait it out with her own oxygen, power, and water, no doubt feeling very smug and eager to emerge and tell a lot of people how she'd told them so. And I waited it out in the most remote corner of her hermetic realm.

  And while we waited, historic events happened. I don't have much of a feel for them even now. I had no television, no newspads, and I'm just like anyone else: if I didn't read it and see it on the pad, it doesn't seem quite real to me. News is now. Reading about it after the fact is history.

  Perhaps this 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 c
op 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 sixty-second 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.