Steel Beach

by John Varley

  ***

  Lacking the CC to pin the blame on, I quickly fastened it on the only other likely candidate. It didn't take long to compile a lengthy list of things I would have done differently, and an even longer one of things I should have done. Some of them were completely illogical, but logic has nothing to do with the death of a baby. Most of these things were decisions that seemed good at the time, hideous in retrospect.

  The big one: How could I justify terminating my pre-natal care? So I'd promised the Heinleiners not to compromise the secret of their null-suits. So what? Was I trying to say my child died because I was protecting a source? I would gladly have betrayed every one of them, root and branch, if it could have helped Mario take that one more breath. And yet…

  That was then; this was now. When I'd made the decision to stay away from doctors my reasons had seemed sufficient, and not dangerous. Bear in mind two things: one, my ignorance of the perils of childbirth. I'd simply had no idea there were so many things that could kill a baby, that there was such a thing as SIDS that could hide itself from early examinations, from mid-term detection, even from the midwife during delivery. The test for SIDS was done after birth, and if the child was at risk it was cured on the spot, as routinely as cutting the cord.

  So you could argue that I wasn't at fault. Even with the best of care, Mario'd have been just as dead if I'd left the ranch and sought help, and me along with him. The CC had said as much. And I did try to convince myself of that, and I almost succeeded, except for the second thing I bade you to bear in mind, which is that I had no business having a child in the first place.

  It's hard for me to remember now, washed as I am in the memory of loving him so dearly, but I haven't tried to hide it from you, my Faithful Reader. I did not love him from the start. I became pregnant foolishly, stayed pregnant mulishly, perversely, for no good reason. While pregnant I felt nothing for the child, certainly no joy in the experience. There were twelve-year-olds who gave birth for better reasons than I. It was only later that he became my whole world and my reason for living. I came to believe that, if I'd loved him that much from the start of his creation, I'd still have him, and that the Biblical scale of my punishment was only fitting.

  With all that to wallow in, and with past history as a guide, I expected I'd be dead soon. So I retired to my cabin in Texas and waited to see what form my self-destruction would take.

  ***

  There had been another culprit to examine before coming to face my own guilt: Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

  She tried to contact me several times after the restoration of order. She sent flowers, candy, little gifts of all kinds. She sent letters, which I didn't read at the time. It wasn't even that I was angry; I just didn't want to hear from her.

  The last gift was a bulldog puppy. I did read the note tied around her neck, which said she was a direct descendant of the noble line of Ch. Sir Winston Disraeli Plantaganet. She was so ugly she went right off the end of the Gruesome Scale and back around to Cute. But her bumptious good nature and wet puppy kisses threatened to cheer me up, to interfere with my wallowing, so I popped her into a cryokennel and added her to my last will and testament, which was my sole useful occupation at the time. If I lived, I'd thaw her.

  I did live, I did thaw her, and Miss Maggie is a great comfort to me.

  As for Liz, she abdicated her throne and committed herself to a dipso academy, got out, fell off, joined A.A. and found sobriety. I'm told she's been clean for six months now and has become a major-league bore about it.

  It's true what she did was dastardly, and although I understand that it's the liquor that does the shit, it's the boozer that takes the drink, so I can't really let her off on that account… but I do forgive her. She had no hand in Mario's death, though she bears a heavy load for some others. Thanks for the mutt, Liz. Next time I see you, I'll buy you a drink.

  ***

  I did live, and for some time that was a wonderment to me. It seemed the CC really had been telling the truth. My self-destructive urges had come from him.

  I'll forgive you if you swallowed that. I believed it, too, at least long enough to get over the worst of my grief and remorse, which is probably just what the CC intended when he told that particular whopper. How do I know it was a lie? I don't really, but I have to assume it was. Perhaps there was a grain of truth in it. It's possible that some seed was planted in my psyche. But I lived it, and I remember it, and the plain truth is I wanted to die. I wish there was some quick and easy way to explain why. Hell, if there was a long and complicated way I'd set it down here; I'm not shy about agonizing, nor about introspection. But I really don't know. It seems so dumb to go through all that and not come out of it with a deeper insight, but the best I can say is that for a while I wanted to kill myself, and now I don't.

  That's why I'm taking it as fact that the CC lied to me. Even if he didn't, I'm responsible for my actions. I can't believe in a suicide compulsion. If the urge was contagious, its germ fell upon fertile ground.

  But it's funny, isn't it? My first attempts seemed prompted by nothing more than a gargantuan funk. Then I found a reason to live, and lost him, and now I feel more alive than ever.

  I wasn't so philosophical at first. When it became apparent to me that I was going to live, when I gave up heaping blame on myself (I'll never entirely give that up, but I can handle it now), when I'd learned the how of his death, I became obsessed with why. I started going to churches again. I usually did it with a few drinks under my belt. Somewhere during the service I'd stand up and begin an angry prayer, the gist of which was why did You do it, You slime-sucking Son of a Big Bang? I'd stand on pews and shout at the ceiling. Usually I got ejected quickly. Once I got arrested for tossing a chair through a stained glass window. There's no doubt about it, I was pretty crazy for a while there.

  I'm better now.

  ***

  Things got back to normal quicker than anyone had a right to expect.

  Whatever they did to the CC, it affected mainly his higher "conscious" functions. Vital services were interrupted only during the Glitch itself, and then only locally. By the time the CC visited me in the Double-C Bar the vast physical plant that is the life blood of Luna was humming right along.

  There were differences, some of which still linger. Communications are iffy much of the time because the still-severed parts of the CC don't talk to each other as easily as they used to. But phone calls get through, the trains still run on time. Things take a little longer-sometimes a lot longer, if they require a computer search-but they get done.

  A measure of that is Susquehanna, Rio Grande, and Columbia Railroad, planned, approved, and built entirely since the Big Glitch. It's now possible to travel from Pennsylvania to Texas on one of the SRG amp;C's three wood-burning steam-powered trains in only five days instead of the thirty minutes it used to take on the Maglev. This is called progress. Most of that time is spent being gently rocked on a siding while holos of virgin wilderness slide by the windows, but you'd swear it was real. It's been a shot in the arm for Texas tourism, and a financial bonanza to Jake and the Mayor, who thought it up and pushed it through. Congratulations, Jake.

  And to Elise, too. Last I heard my star pupil had her own table at the Alamo where she fleeces tourists by the dozens every day. Know when to fold 'em, honey.

  I went out to visit Fox the other day, still hard at work in Oregon. We swapped Glitch stories, as everybody still does who hasn't seen each other for a while, and he had been little affected. He hadn't even heard of it for the first twenty-four hours, because his own computers functioned independently of the CC, like Callie's. Turns out I could have hid out in Oregon as well as at the CC, but I don't think anything would have turned out differently. It wasn't a friendly visit, though, since I was there representing the SRG amp;C, whose tunnel was half-way from Lonesome Dove to the shores of the Columbia, and which Fox had vehemently opposed. He wanted to keep Oregon pristine, didn't even want to allow the small edge sett
lement, a logging camp to be called Sweet Home, which would be the northwest terminus of the railroad. I told him a few guys in plaid shirts with sawblades weren't going to hurt his precious forest, and he called me a capitalist plunderer. A plunderer, imagine that! I'm afraid that what spark had been there was long extinguished. Kiss my axe, Fox.

  A few months after the crisis, when I was finally emerging from my church-vandalizing funk, I had need of Darling Bobbie's services again, so I went looking for him only to find he'd turned himself back into Crazy Bob and was no longer on the Hadleyplatz. He wasn't back on the Leystrasse, either. I finally ran him to ground in Mall X, the ultra-avant fleshmart, where he now specialized in only the more outrageous body styles favored by the young. He tried to talk me into getting my head put in a box, but I reminded him it was me and Brenda who were responsible for that particular fashion outrage, with our story on the Grand Flack. He did the work I required for old times' sake, but rather grudgingly, I thought. Crazy again, after all these years.

  As for the Grand Flack himself, I heard from him, too. He called me up to thank me. I couldn't imagine what I'd done to deserve that, and didn't really want to listen to him, but I gathered he now regretted all the time he'd spent on the outside, seeing to the affairs of the Flacks. In prison he was able to devote himself to television around the clock. He wanted me to speak to the judge and see about extending his sentence. I'll surely try, old man.

  ***

  One of the first changes you notice after the Glitch is how much more medical treatment you need. My body is still full of nanobots, I assume, but they don't work as well or with as much coordination as they used to. I never actually researched why it's like that, having very little interest in the subject. But for whatever reason, I now have to go in almost monthly to have cancers eradicated. I don't mind, much, but a lot of people do, and it's just one more thing adding pressure to the Restore the Cortex movement, those folks who want to bring back the CC, only bigger and wiser. We're so spoiled in this day and age. We tend to forget what a nuisance cancer used to be.

  That's where I ran into Callie, at the medico shop, having her own cancers removed. Runs in the family, as they say.

  We didn't speak. This wasn't an unusual condition between us; I've spent half my life not speaking to Callie, or not being spoken to.

  She had come to get me up at the cave. That's probably a good thing, as I don't know for sure if I'd have been able to get up from the grave and walk home on my own. It may even be a good thing that she asked me the question she had no right to ask, because it made me angry enough to forget my grief for long enough to scream and shout at her and get her screaming and shouting back. She asked me who the father was. She, who had never allowed me to ask that question, she who had made my childhood so miserable I used to dream about a Daddy arriving on a white horse, telling me it had all been a big mistake, that he really loved me and that Callie was a gypsy witch who'd kidnapped me from the cradle.

  Sometimes I think our society is screwed up about this father business. Just because we can all bear children, is that an excuse to virtually eliminate the role of father? Then I think about Brenda and her old man, and about how common that sort of thing used to be, and you wonder if males should be allowed around little children at all.

  All I knew for sure was I missed mine, and Callie said she'd tell me if I really wanted to know such a silly thing, and I said don't bother because I think I know who it is, and she laughed and said you don't understand anything, and that's when we stopped talking and walked down the hill, together but alone, as we'd always been. See you in twenty years, Callie.

  Still, I think I do know.

  As for Kitten Parker… why spoil his day?

  ***

  A year has passed now. I still think of Mario. And I often wake up in the middle of the night seeing Winston tearing the arm off that King City policewoman. I never found out what happened to her. She was as much a victim as any of us; the KC Cops were dragooned into the war by the CC, had no idea what they were doing, and too many of them died.

  A year has passed, and we change, and yet things stay the same. The world rolls over the holes left by the departed, fills in those spaces. I didn't know how I'd run the Texian without Charity, but her sources started coming to me with stories, and before long one of them had emerged to take her place. He's not near as pretty as she as, but he has the makings of a reporter.

  I'm still running the paper, still teaching at the school. And I'm the new Mayor of New Austin. I didn't run, but when the citizen's committee put my name forward I didn't pull out, either. The Gila Monster column is still as venomous as ever. Maybe it's a conflict of interest, but no one seems too concerned. If the opposition doesn't like it, let them start their own paper.

  Once a week I have a guest column in the Daily Cream. I think it's Walter's way of trying to lure me back. Not likely, Walter. I think that part of my life is done. Still, you never know. I didn't think they could talk me into being Mayor, either.

  I saw Walter only last week, in the newly re-opened Blind Pig. The old one had been destroyed by fire during the Glitch and for a while Deep Throat had threatened to leave it shuttered. But he bowed under the weight of public demand and threw a big party to celebrate. Most of King City's fourth estate was there, and those that weren't stoned when they arrived soon became so.

  We did all the things reporters do when gathered in groups: drank, assassinated the characters of absent colleagues, told all the scandalous stories about celebrities and politicians we couldn't print, drank, hinted at stories we were about to break we actually knew nothing about, re-hashed old fights and uncovered new conspiracies in high places, drank, threw up, drank some more. A few punches were thrown, a few tempers soothed, many hands of poker were played. The new Blind Pig wasn't bad, but nothing is ever as good as the good old days, so many complaints were heard. I figured that fifty years of mopped-up blood and spilled drinks and smokes and broken crockery and the new place would be pretty much like the old and only me and a few others would even remember the old Pig had burned.

  At one point I found myself sitting by the big round table in the back room where serious cards were played. I wasn't playing-nobody in that room had trusted me at a card table in years. Walter was there, scowling at his hand as if losing the pitiful little pot would send him home to his fifty-room mansion penniless. Cricket was there, too, doing his patented does-a-flush-beat-a-straight befuddled routine, looking ever so dapper a gent now that he'd affected nineteenth-century clothing as a more or less permanent element of his style. In his double-breasted tweed jacket and high starched collar he was easily the most interesting guy in the room, but the spark was gone. Too bad, Cricket. If you'd only had any sense we could have made each other's lives miserable for five, six years, and parted heartily detesting each other. Think of all the great fights you missed, damn you, and eat your heart out. And Cricket, a friend should take you aside and tell you to drop the innocent act, at the poker table at least. It worked better when you were a girl, and it wasn't that great even then.

  And who should be sitting behind the biggest stack of chips, calm, smiling faintly, cards face-down on the table and worrying the hell out of everyone else… but Brenda Starr, confidant of celebrities, the toast of three planets, and well on her way to becoming the most powerful gossip journalist since Louella Parsons. There was very little left of the awkward, earnest, ignorant child I'd reluctantly taken on two years earlier. She was still incredibly tall and just about as young, but everything else had changed. She dressed now, and while I thought her choices were outrageous she had the confidence to make her own style. The old Brenda could now be seen only in the cub reporter groupie at her elbow, attentive to her every need, a gorgeous gumdrop who no doubt had grown up wanting to meet and hobnob with famous people, as Brenda had, as I had. I watched her turn her cards over, rake in another pot, and lean back watching the new deal. Her hand stroked the knee of the girl, casually possessive, and
she winked at me. Don't spend it all in one place, Brenda.

  During the next hand the talk turned, as it eventually does at these things, to the affairs of the world. I didn't contribute; I'd found early on that if people noticed me they tended to clam up about the Big Glitch. This was a group that kept few secrets. Everyone there knew about Mario, and many of them knew of my troubles with the CC. Some probably knew of my suicides. It made them cautious, as most probably couldn't imagine what it must be like to lose a child like that. I wanted to tell them it was all right, I was okay, but it's no use, so I just sat back and listened.

  First there was the CC, and should we bring him back. The consensus was that we shouldn't, but we would. Having him the way he was was just so damn handy. Sure, he screwed up there at the end, but the Big Brains can handle that, can't they? I mean, if they can put a man on Pluto a week after he left Luna, why don't they spend some of that money to make things easier and more convenient to the taxpaying citizens? I think that's what will happen. We're a democracy-especially now that the CC's no longer around to meddle-and if we vote for damn foolishness, damn foolishness is what we'll get. I just hope they make provision this time around for somebody to give the New CC hugs on a regular basis. Otherwise, he's apt to get pettish again.

  There was no consensus on the other big topic of the day. It was a question that cut deeply and would certainly cause many more shouting matches before it was resolved. What do you do with the new things the CC discovered during his rogue years? In particular, how about this memory-recording and cloning business, eh?

  The Hitler analogy was brought up and bandied about. Under Hitler's reign a Dr. Mengele performed unethical experiments-sheer torture, mainly-on human subjects. I don't know if anything useful was learned, but suppose there was. Was it ethical to use that knowledge, to benefit from that much evil? It seems to me your answer depends a lot on your world view. Myself, I'm not sure if it's ethical (which probably says a lot about my world view), but I don't think it's wrong, and I have a personal involvement in the question. Right or wrong though, I do think it will be used, and so did just about everybody else in the room, reporters being the way they are. People were going through the records the CC didn't destroy-I'm one of those records in a way, but not a very forthcoming one-looking for new knowledge, and if it has a practical use, it will be used. Cry over that if you're so inclined. Myself, I guess in the end I feel knowledge has no right or wrong. It's just knowledge. It's not like the law, where some knowledge is admissible and some tainted by the method of its discovery.