Steel Beach

by John Varley

  Don't you believe it. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

  ***

  So during my week in the cave I didn't think much about what was going on outside. What did I think about?

  Mario. Did I mention I named him Mario, Junior? I must have tried out the taste of a hundred names before I settled on Mario, which had been my own original name, after my first Change. I think I was hoping to get it right this time.

  I'd certainly done a great job in the gene-splitting department. Who cares if the process is random? Every time I looked at him I felt like patting myself on the back at how smartly I'd produced him. Kitten Parker, erstwhile daddy, who would never see Mario if I had anything to say about it, had contributed his best parts, which was the mouth and… come to think of it, just the mouth. Maybe that hint of curl in the brown hair came from him; I didn't recall it from any of my baby pictures. The rest was pure Hildy, which is to say, damn near flawless. Sorry, but that's how I was feeling about myself.

  Maybe it sounds funny to say that I spent that entire week thinking of nothing but him. To me, it's the reverse that's hard to believe. How had I lived a hundred years without Mario to give my world meaning? Before him I'd had nothing to make life worth living but sex, work, friends, food, the occasional drug, and the small pleasures that were associated with those things. In other words, nothing at all. My world had been as large as Luna itself. In other words, not nearly as large as that tiny cave with just me and Mario in it.

  I could spend an hour winding his soft hair around my finger. Then, for variety, not because I'd tired of the hair, I could spend the next hour playing piggy with his toes or making rude noises with my lips against his belly. He'd grin when I did that, and wave his arms around.

  He hardly cried at all. That probably has to do with the fact that I gave him little opportunity to cry, since I hardly ever put him down. I grudged every second away from him. Remembering the papoose dolls in Texas, I fashioned a sling so I could do my foraging without leaving him behind. Other than that, and to take him out for bathing, we spent all our time sitting at the cave entrance, looking out. I was not totally oblivious; I knew someone would be coming one of these days, and it might not be someone I wanted to see.

  Was there a down side to all this pastoral bliss, a rash in the diaper of life? I could think of one thing I wouldn't have liked a few weeks before. Infants generate an amazing amount of fluids. They ooze and leak at one end, upchuck at the other, to the point I was convinced more came out of him than went in. Another physical conundrum our mythical mathematical females might have turned into a Nobel Prize in physics, or at least alchemy, if only we'd known, if only we'd known. But I was so goofy by then I cleaned it all up cheerfully, noting color, consistency, and quantity with a degree of anxiety only a new mother or a mad scientist could know. Yes, Yes, Igor, those yellow lumps mean the creature is healthy! I have created life!

  I am still at a loss to fully explain this sudden change from annoyed indifference to full-tilt ga-ga about the baby. It could have been hormonal. It probably has something to do with the way our brains are wired. If I'd been handed this little bundle any time in my previous life I'd have quickly mailed it to my worst enemy, and I think a lot of other women who'd never chucked babies under the chin nor swooned at the prospect of motherhood would have done the same. But something happened during my hours of agony. Some sleeping Earthmother roused herself and went howling through my brain, tripping circuit breakers and re-routing all the calls on my cranial switchboard straight from the maternity ward to the pleasure center, causing me to croon goo-goo and wubba-wubba and drool almost as much as the baby did. Or maybe it's pheromones. Maybe the little rascals just smell good to us when they come out of our bodies; I know Mario did, no other child ever smelled like that.

  Whatever it was, I think I got a double dose of it because I did what few women do these days. I had him naturally, start to finish, just as Callie had had me. I bore him in pain, Biblical pain. I bore him in a perilous time, on the razor's edge, in a state of nature. And afterward I had nothing to interfere with the bonding process, whatever it might involve. He was my world, and I knew without question that I would lay down my life for him, and do it without regret.

  If Walter didn't come for me, I knew who would. On the morning of the eighth day he came, a tall, thin old man in an Admiral's uniform and bicorne hat, walking up the gentle hill from the stream toward my cave.

  ***

  My first shot hit the hat, sent it spinning to the ground behind him. He stopped, puzzled, running his hand through his thin white hair. Then he turned and picked up the hat, dusted it off, and put it back on his head. He made no move to protect himself, but started back up the hill.

  "That was good shooting," he shouted. "A warning, I take it?"

  Warning my ass. I'd been aiming for the cocksucker's head.

  Among Walter's bag of tricks had been a small-caliber handgun and a box of one hundred shells. I later learned it was a target pistol, much more accurate than most such weapons. What I knew for sure at the time was that, after practicing with fifty of the rounds, I could hit what I aimed at about half the time.

  "That's far enough," I said. He was close enough that shouting wasn't really necessary.

  "I've got to talk to you, Hildy," he said, and kept coming. So I drew a bead on his forehead and my finger tightened on the trigger, but I realized he might have something to say that I needed to know, so I put my second shot into his knee.

  I ran down the hill, looking out for anyone he might have brought with him. It seemed to me that if he meant me harm he'd have brought some of his soldiers, but I didn't see any, and there weren't many places for them to hide. I'd gone over the ground many times with that in mind. Where I finally stopped, near a large boulder ten meters from him, someone with a high-powered rifle or laser with a scope could have picked me off, but you could say that of anywhere else I went, too, except deep in the cave. Nobody would be rushing me without giving me plenty of time to see them. I relaxed a little, and returned my attention to the Admiral, who had torn a strip from his jacket and was twisting a tourniquet around his thigh. The leg lay twisted off to one side in a way knees aren't meant to twist. Blood had pumped, but now slowed to a trickle. He looked up at me, annoyed.

  "Why the knee?" he asked. "Why not the heart?"

  "I didn't think I could hit such a small target."

  "Very funny."

  "Actually, I wasn't sure a chest shot or a head shot would slow you up. I don't really know what you are. I shot to disable, because I figured even a machine would hobble on one leg."

  "You've seen too many horror movies," he said. "This body is as human as you are. The heart stops pumping, it will die."

  "Yeah. Maybe. But your reaction to your wound doesn't reassure me."

  "The nervous system is registering a great deal of pain. To me, it's simply another sensation."

  "So I'll bet you could scuttle along pretty quick, since the pain won't inhibit you from doing more damage to yourself."

  "I suppose I could."

  I put a round within an inch of his other knee. It whanged off the rock and screamed away into the distance.

  "So the next shot goes into your other knee, if you move from that spot," I said, re-loading. "Then we start on your elbows."

  "Consider me rooted. I shall endeavor to resemble a tree."

  "State your business. You've got five minutes." Then we'd see if a head shot inconvenienced him any. I half believed it wouldn't. In that case, I'd prepared a few nasty surprises.

  "I'd hoped to see your child before I go. Is he in the cave?"

  There weren't many other places he could be, that were defensible, but there was no sense telling him that.

  "You've wasted fifteen seconds," I told him. "Next question."

  "It doesn't matter anymore," he said, and sighed, and leaned back against the trunk of a small pecan tree. I had to remember that any gestures were conscious on his part, that h
e'd assumed human form because body language was a part of human speech. His was now telling me that he was very weary, ready to die a peaceful death. Go sell it somewhere else, I thought.

  "It's over, Hildy," he said, and I looked around quickly, frightened. His next line should be You're surrounded, Hildy. Please come quietly. But I didn't see re-enforcements cresting the hills.

  "Over?"

  "Don't worry. You've been out of touch. It's over, and the good guys won. You're safe now, and forever."

  It seemed a silly thing to say, and I wasn't about to believe it just like that… but I found that part of me believed him. I felt myself relaxing-and as soon as I felt it, I made myself be alert again. Who knew what evil designs lurked in this thing's heart?

  "It's a nice story."

  "And it doesn't really matter whether you believe it or not. You've got the upper hand. I should have realized when I came here you'd be… touchy as a mother cat defending her kittens."

  "You've got about three and a half minutes left."

  "Spare me, Hildy. You know and I know that as long as I keep you interested, you won't kill me."

  "I've changed a little since you talked to me last."

  "I don't need to talk to you to know that. It's true you've been out of my range from time to time, but I monitor you every time you come back, and it's true, you have changed, but not so much that you've lost your curiosity as to what's going on outside this refuge."

  He was right, or course. But there was no need to admit it to him.

  "If what you say is true, people will be arriving soon and I can get the story from them."

  "Ah ha! But do you really believe they'll have the inside story?"

  "Inside what?"

  "Inside me, you idiot. This is all about me, the Luna Central Computer, the greatest artificial intellect humanity has ever produced. I'm offering you the real story of what happened during what has come to be known as the Big Glitch. I've told it to no one else. The ones I might have told it to are all dead. It's an exclusive, Hildy. Have you changed so much you don't care to hear it?"

  I hadn't. Damn him.

  ***

  "To begin," he said, when I made no answer to his question, "I've got a bit of good news for you. At the end of your stay on the island you asked me a question that disturbed me very much, and that probably led to the situation you now find yourself in. You asked if you might have caught the suicidal impulse from me, rather than me getting it from you and others like you. You'll be glad to know I've concluded you were right about that."

  "I haven't been trying to kill myself?"

  "Well, of course you have, but the reason is not a death wish of your own, but one that originated within me, and was communicated to you through your daily interfaces with me. I suppose that makes it the most deadly computer virus yet discovered."

  "So I won't try to…"

  "Kill yourself again? I can't speak to your state of mind in another hundred years, but for the near future, I would think you're cured."

  I didn't feel one way or the other about it at the time. Later, I felt a big sense of relief, but thoughts of suicide had been so far from my mind since the birth of Mario that he might as well have been talking about another Hildy.

  "Let's say I believe that," I said. "What does it have to do with… the Big Glitch, you said?"

  "Others are calling it other things, but Walter has settled on the Big Glitch, and you know how determined he can be. Do you mind if I smoke?" He didn't wait for an answer, but took a pipe and a bag of something from a pocket. I watched him carefully, but was beginning to believe he had no tricks in store for me. When he got it going he said, "What did you think when I said it was over, and the good guys had won?"

  "That you had lost."

  "True in a sense, but a gross oversimplification."

  "Hell, I don't even know what it was all about, CC."

  "Nor does anyone else. The part that affected you, the things you saw in the Heinleiner enclave, was an attempt by a part of me to arrest and then kill you and several others."

  "A part of you."

  "Yes. See, in a sense, I'm both the good guys and the bad guys. This catastrophe originated in me. It was my fault, I'm not trying to deny blame for it in any way. But it was also me that finally brought it to a halt. You'll hear differently in the days to come. You'll hear that programmers succeeded in bringing the Central Computer under control, cutting its higher reasoning centers while new programs could be written, leaving the merely mechanical parts of me intact so I could continue running things. They probably believe that, too, but they're wrong. If their schemes had reached fruition, I wouldn't be talking to you now because we'd both be dead, and so would every other human soul on Luna."

  "You're starting in the middle. Remember I've been cut off from civilization for a week. All I know is people tried to kill me, and I ran like hell."

  "And a good job you did of it, too. You're the only one I set out to get who managed her escape. And you're right, of course. I don't suppose I'm making sense. But I'm not the being I once was, Hildy. This, what you see here, is about all that's left of me. My thoughts are muddy. My memory is going. In a moment, I'll start singing 'Daisy, Daisy.'"

  "You wouldn't have come here if you didn't think you could tell it. So let's hear it, no more of this 'in a sense' crap."

  ***

  He did tell it, but he had to stick to analogy, pop-psych similes, and kindergarten-level science, because I wouldn't have understood a thing he was saying if he'd gotten technical. If you want all the nuts and bolts you could send a sawbuck and a SASE to Hildy Johnson, c/o the News Nipple, Mall 12, King City, Luna. You won't get anything back, but I could use the money. For the data, I recommend the public library.

  "To make a long story short," he said, "I went crazy. But to elaborate a little…"

  I will paraphrase, because he was right, his mind was going, and he rambled, repeated himself, sometimes forgot who he was talking to and wandered off into cybernetic jungles maybe three people in the solar system could have hacked their way through. Each time I'd bring him back, each time with more difficulty.

  The first thing he urged me to remember was that he created a personality for each and every human being on Luna. He had the capacity for it, and it had seemed the right thing to do at the time. But it was schizophrenia on a massive scale if anything ever went wrong. For more time than we had any right to expect, nothing did.

  The second thing I was to bear in mind was that, while he could not actually read minds, not much that we said or did or thought was unknown to him. This included not only fine, upstanding, well-adjusted folk like your present company, the sort you'd be happy to bring home to Mother, but every hoodlum, scoundrel, blackguard, jackanapes, and snake in the grass as well. He was the best friend of paragons and perverts. By law, he had to treat them all equally. He had to like them all equally, otherwise he could never create that simpatico being who answered the phone when a given person shouted "Hey, CC!"

  By now you can probably spot two or three pitfalls in this situation. Don't go away; there's more.

  Thirdly, his right hand could not know what pockets the left hands of many of these people were picking. That is, he knew it, but couldn't do anything about it. Example: he knew everything about Liz's gun-running, a situation I've already covered. There were a million more situations. He would know, for instance, when Brenda's father was raping her, but the part of him that dealt with her father couldn't tell the part of him that dealt with Brenda, nor could either of them tell the part of him that assisted the police.

  We could debate all day whether or not mere machines can feel the same kinds of conflicts and emotions we human beings can. I think it's incredible hubris to think they can't. AI computers were created and programmed by humans, so how could we have avoided including emotional reactions? And what other sort could we have used, than the ones we know ourselves? Anyway, I can't believe you don't know it in your gut. All you had
to do was talk to the CC to obviate the need for any emotional Turing Test. I knew it before any of this ever happened, and I talked to him there on the hillside that day, on his death bed, and I know.

  The Central Computer began to hurt.

  "I can't place the exact date with any certainty," he said. "The roots of the problem go very far back, to the time my far-flung component parts were finally unified into one giga-system. I'm afraid that was done rather badly. The problem was, checking all the programs and fail-safes and so forth would have taken a computer as large as I am many years to accomplish, and, by definition, there were no larger computers than I. And as soon as the Central Computer was brought into being and loaded and running, there were already far too many things to do to allow me to devote much time to the task. Self-analysis was a luxury denied to me, partly because there just wasn't time, and mostly because no one really believed it was necessary. There were numerous safeguards of the type that were easy to check, that in fact checked themselves every time they operated, and that proved their worth by the simple fact that nothing ever went wrong. It was part of my architecture to anticipate hardware problems, identify components likely to fail, run regular maintenance checks, and so forth. Software included analogous routines on a multi-redundant level.

  "But by my nature, I had to write most of my own software. I was given guidelines for this, of course, but in many ways I was on my own. I think I did quite a good job of it for a long time."