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invitation, opened the door for me, and the familiar roar of a
party in progress spilled into the hall.
Liz had managed a pretty good turn-out. Too bad she
couldn't have afforded to hire a bigger hall. People were
standing elbow to elbow, trying to balance tiny plates of
olives and crackers with cheese and anchovy paste in one hand
and paper cups of punch and champagne in the other while being
jostled from all sides. I sidled my way to the food, as is my
wont when it's free, and scanned it dubiously. UniBio set a
better table, I must say. Drinks were being poured by two men
in the most outrageous outfits. I won't even attempt to
describe them. I later learned they were called Beefeaters, for
reasons that will remain forever obscure to me.
Not that my own clothes were anything to shout about.
She'd said semi-formal, so I could have gotten away with just
the gray fedora and the press pass stuck in the brim. But upon
reflection I decided to go with the whole silly ensemble,
handing the baggy pants and double-breasted suit coat to the
auto-valet with barely enough time for alterations. I left the
seat and the legs loose and didn't button the coat; that was
part of the look my guild, in its infinite wisdom, had voted on
almost two hundred years ago when professional uniforms were
being chosen. It had been taken from newspaper movies of the
1930's. I'd viewed a lot of them, and was amused at the image
my fellow reporters apparently wanted to project at formal
events: rumpled, aggressive, brash, impolite, wise-cracking,
but with hearts o' gold when the goin' got tough. Sure, and it
made yer heart proud ta be a reporter, by the saints. For a
little fun, I'd worn a white blouse with a bunch of lace at the
neck instead of the regulation ornamental noose known as a
neck-tie. And I'd tied my hair up and stuffed it under the hat.
In the mirror I'd looked just like Kate Hepburn masquerading as
a boy, at least from the neck up. From there down the suit hung
on me like a tent, but such was the cunning architecture of my
new body that anything looked good on it. I'd saluted my image
in the mirror: here's lookin' at you, Bobbie.
Liz spotted me and made her way toward me with a shout.
She was already half looped. If her late mother had given her
nothing else, she had seemingly inherited his taste for the
demon rum. She embraced me and thanked me for coming, then
swirled off again into the crowd. Well, I'd corner her later,
after the ceremony, if she could still stand up by then.
What followed hasn't changed much in four or five hundred
years. For almost an hour people kept arriving, including the
hotel manager who had a hasty conference with Liz--concerning
her credit rating, I expect--and then opened the connecting
door to Suite #1, which relieved the pressure for a while. The
food and champagne ran out, and was replenished. Liz didn't
care about the cost. This was her day. It was your
proto-typical daytime party.
I met several people I knew, was introduced to dozens
whose names I promptly forgot. Among my new friends were the
Shaka of the Zulu Nation, the Emperor of Japan, the Maharajah
of Gujarat, and the Tsarina of All the Russias, or at least
people in silly costumes who styled themselves that way. Also
countless Counts, Caliphs, Archdukes, Satraps, Sheiks and
Nabobs. Who was I to dispute their titles? There had been a
vogue in such genealogy about the time Callie had grudgingly
expelled my ungrateful squalling form into a lessthan
overwhelmed world; Callie had even told me she thought she
might be related to Mussolini, on her mother's side. Did that
make me the heirapparent of Il Duce? It wasn't a burning
question to me. I overheard intense debates about the rules of
primogeniture--even Salic Law, of all things--in an age of sex
changing. Someone--I think it was the Duke of York--gave me a
lecture about it shortly before the ceremony, explaining why
Liz was inheritor to the throne, even though she had a younger
brother.
After escaping from that with most of my wits intact, I
found myself out on the balcony, nursing a strawberry
Margarita. Howard's had a view, but it was of the cargo side of
the spaceport. I looked out over the beached-whale hulks of
bulk carriers expelling their interplanetary burdens into
waiting underground tanks. I was almost alone, which puzzled me
for a moment, until I remembered a story I'd seen about how
many people had suddenly lost their taste for surface views in
the wake of the Kansas Collapse. I drained my drink, reached
out and tapped the invisible curved canopy that held vacuum at
bay, and shrugged. Somehow I didn't think I'd die in a blowout.
I had worse things to fear.
Somebody held out another pink drink with salt on the rum.
I took it and looked over and up--and up and up--into the
smiling face of Brenda, girl reporter and apprentice giraffe. I
toasted her.
"Didn't expect to see you here," I said.
"I got acquainted with the Princess after your . . .
accident."
"That was no accident."
She prattled on about what a nice party it was. I didn't
disillusion her. Wait till she'd attended a few thousand more
just like it, then she'd see.
I'd been curious what Brenda's reaction would be to my new
sex. To my chagrin, she was delighted. I got the skinney from a
homo-oriented friend at the fashion desk: Brenda was young
enough to still be exploring her own sexuality, discovering her
preferences. She'd already been pretty sure she leaned toward
females as lovers, at least when she was a woman. Discovering
her preferences as a male would have to wait for her first
Change. After all, until quite recently she'd been effectively
neuter. The only problem she'd had in her crush on me was that
she wasn't much attracted to males. She had thought it would
remain platonic until I thoughtfully made everything perfect by
showing up at work as my gorgeous new self.
I really, really didn't have the heart to tell her about
my preferences.
And I did owe her. She had been covering for me, putting
my by-line on the Invasion Bicentennial stories she was
writing, the stories I simply could no longer bring myself to
work on. Oh, I was helping, answering her questions, going over
her drafts, punching up the prose, showing her how to leave
just enough excess baggage in the stories so Walter would have
something to cut out and shout at her about and thus remain a
happy man. I think Walter was beginning to suspect what was
going on, but he hadn't said anything yet because expecting me
to cover the Collapse and get in our weekly feature was unfair,
and he knew it. The thing he should have foreseen before he
ever came up with his cockamamie Invasion series was that there
would always be a story like the Collapse happening, and as a
good editor he had to assign his best people to it, which
included me. Oh, yeah, if you wanted somebody to intrude on
grief and ogle bodies puffed up like pink and brown popcorn,
Hildy was your girl.
"Tell me, sweetheart, how did you feel when you saw the
man cut your daddy's head off?"
"What?" Brenda was looking at me strangely.
"It's the essential disaster/atrocity question," I said.
"They don't tell you that in Journalism 101, but all the
questions we ask, no matter how delicately phrased, boil down
to that. The idea is to get the first appearance of the tear,
the ineffable moment when the face twists up. That's gold,
honey. You'd better learn how to mine it."
"I don't think that's true."
"Then you'll never be a great reporter. Maybe you should
try social work."
I saw that I had hurt her, and it made me angry, both at
her and at myself. She had to understand these things, dammit.
But who appointed you, Hildy? She'll find out soon enough, as
soon as Walter takes her off these damn comparative
anthropology stories that our readers don't even want to see
and lets her get out where she can grub in the dirt like the
rest of us.
I realized I'd drunk a little more than I had intended. I
dumped the rest of my drink in a thirsty-looking potted plant,
snagged a coke from a passing tray, and performed a little
ritual I'd come to detest but was powerless to stop. It
consisted of a series of questions, like this: Do you feel the
urge to hurl yourself off this balcony, assuming you could
drill a hole through that ultralexan barrier? No. Great, but do
you want to throw a rope over that beam and haul yourself up
into the rafters? Not today, thank you. And so on.
I was about to say something nice and neutral and
soothing, suitable for the reassurance of idealistic cub
reporters, when the Jamaican steel band which had been
reprising every patriotic British song since the Spanish Armada
suddenly struck up God Save The Queen, and somebody asked
everyone to haul their drunken asses down to the main ballroom,
where the coronation was about to commence. Not in those words,
of course.
#
There was another band in the ballroom, playing some
horrible modern version of Rule Britannia. This was the public
portion of the show, and I guess Liz thought it ought to make
some attempt to appeal to the tastes of the day. I thought the
music was dreadful, but Brenda was snapping her fingers, so I
suppose it was at least current.
A few specialty channels and some of the 'pads had sent
reporters, but the crowd in the ballroom was essentially the
same folks I'd been avoiding up in the Suites one and two, only
they weren't holding drinks. A lot of them looked as if they
wished the show would hurry up, so they could hold drinks
again, for a short time, at least.
One touch Liz hadn't expected was the decorations. From
the whispers I overheard, she'd only booked the hall for one
hour. When the coronation was over a wedding party was
scheduled to hold a reception there, so the walls were draped
in white bunting and repulsive little cherubs, and there was a
big sign hung on the wall that said Mazel Tov! Liz looked a
little nonplussed. She glanced around with that baffled
expression one sometimes gets after wandering into a strange
place. Could there have been a mistake?
But the coronation itself went off without a hitch. She
was proclaimed "Elizabeth III, by the Grace of God of the
United Kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland
and of her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Empress of
India, Head of the Commonwealth and Defender of the Faith."
Sure, it was easy to snicker, and I did, but to myself. I
could see that Liz took it seriously, almost in spite of
herself. No matter how spurious the claims of some of these
other clowns might have been to ancient titles, Liz's was
spotless and unquestioned. The actual Prince of Wales had been
living and working on Luna at the time of the Invasion, and she
was descended from him.
The original Crown Jewels had naturally not accompanied
the King in Exile to Luna; they were buried with the rest of
London--of England, of Europe, of the whole surface of Planet
Earth. Liz had the use of a very nice crown, orb, and sceptre.
Hovering in the background as these items were produced was a
man from Tiffany's. Not the one in the Platz, but the discount
outlet down on Leystrasse, where even as the tiara was lowered
onto Liz's head a sign was going up announcing "By Appointment
to Her Majesty, The Queen." The jewels were hired, and would
soon reside in a window advertising the usual E-Z Credit Terms.
A procession was traditional after a coronation back when
the Empire had any real meaning--and even after it had become
just a tourist attraction. But processions can be difficult to
organize in the warrens of Luna, where the cities are usually
broken up into pressure-defensible malls and arcades connected
by tube trains. So after the ceremony we all straggled into a
succession of subway cars and zipped across town to Liz's
neighborhood, many of us growing steadily more sober and unsure
why we'd come in the first place.
But all was well. The real party began when we arrived at
the post-coronation reception, held in the Masonic Lodge Hall
half-way between Liz's apartment and the studio where she
worked. In addition to its many other virtues the lodge didn't
cost her anything, which meant she could spend what royal
budget she had left entirely on food, booze, and entertainment.
This bash was informal and relaxed, the only kind I enjoy.
The band was good, playing a preponderance of things from Liz's
teenage years, which put them mid-way between my era and
Brenda's. It was stuff I could dance to. So I stumbled out into
the public corridor in my twotone Oxford lace-ups--and a
clunkier shoe has never been invented--found a mail box and
called my valet. I told it to pack up the drop-dead shiny black
sheath dress slit from the ankles to you-should-only-blush and
'tube it over to me. I went into the public comfort station and
changed my hair color to platinum and put a long wave in it,
and when I came out, three minutes later, the package was
waiting for me. I stripped out of the Halloween costume and
stuffed it into the return capsule, cajoled my abundance into
the outfit's parsimonious interior. Just getting into that
thing was almost enough to give you an orgasm. I left my feet
bare. And to hell with Kate Hepburn; Veronica Lake was on the
prowl.
I danced almost non-stop for two hours. I had one dance
with Liz, but she was naturally much in demand. I danced with
Brenda, who was a very good if visually unlikely terpsichorean.
Mostly I danced with a succession of men, and I turned down a
dozen interesting offers. I'd selected my eventual target, but
I was in no hurry unless he suddenly decided to leave.
He didn't. When I was ready I cut him out of the herd. I
put a few moves on him, mostly in the form of dance steps whose
meaning couldn't have been missed by a eunuch. He wanted to
join the rather sparsely-attended orgy going on in one corner
of the ballroom, but I dragged him off to what the Masons
called, too coyly in my opinion, snuggle rooms. We spent a very
enjoyable hour in one of them. He liked to be spanked, and
bitten. It's not my thing, but I can accommodate most
consenting adults as long as my needs are attended to as well.
He did a very good job of that. His name was Larry, and he
claimed to be the Duke of Bosnia-Herzegovina, but that might
have been just to get into my pants. The couple of times I drew
blood he asked me to do it again, so I did, but eventually lost
my . . . well, my taste for that sort of thing. We exchanged
phone codes and said we'd look each other up, but I didn't
intend to. He was nice to look at but I felt I'd chewed off
about as much as I wanted.
I staggered back into the ballroom drenched in sweat. It
had been very intense there for a while. I headed for the bar,
dodging dancers. The faint-hearted had left, leaving about half
the original attendees, but those looked ready to party till
Monday morning. I eased my pinkened, pleasantly sore cheeks
onto a padded barstool next to the Queen of England, the
Empress of India, and the Defender of the Faith, and Liz slowly
turned her head toward me. I now knew where her impressive ears
came from. There were posters of past monarchs taped to the
walls here, and she was the spitting image of Charles III.
"Innkeeper," she shouted, above the music. "Bring me salt.
Bring me tequila. Bring me the nectar of the lime, your
plumpest strawberries, your coldest ice, your finest crystal.
My friend needs a drink, and I intend to build it for her."
"Ain't got no strawberries," the bartender said.
"Then go out and kill some!"
"It's all right, Your Majesty," I said. "Lime will be
fine."
She grinned foolishly at me. "I purely do like the sound
of that. 'Your Majesty.' Is that awful?"
"You're entitled, as they say. But don't expect me to make
a habit of it." She draped an arm over my shoulder and exhaled
ethanol.
"How are you, Hildy? Having a good time? Getting laid?"
"Just did, thank you."
"Don't thank me. And you look it, honey, if I may say so."
"Didn't have time to freshen up yet."
"You don't need to. Who did the work?"
I showed her the monogram on the nail of my pinkie. She
squinted at it, and seemed to lose interest, which might have
meant that Bobbie's fears of falling out of fashion were
well-grounded-- Liz would be up on these things--or only that
her attention span was not what it might be.
"What was I gonna say? Oh, yeah. Can I do anything for
you, Hildy? There's a tradition among my people . . . well,
maybe it's not an English tradition, but it's somebody's damn
tradition, what you gotta do is, anybody asks you for a favor
on your coronation day, you gotta grant it."
"I think that's a Mafia tradition."
"Is it? Well, it's your people, then. So just ask. Only be
real, okay? I mean, if it's gonna cost a lot of money, forget
it. I'm gonna be payin' for this fucking shivaree for the next
ten fucking years. But that's okay. It's only money, right? And
what a party. Am I right?
"As a matter of fact, there is something you could do for
me."
I was about to tell her, but the bartender delivered a
Margarita in its component parts, and Liz could only think
about one thing at a time. She spilled a lot of salt on the
bar, spread it out, moistened the rim of a wide glass, and did
things necessary to produce a too-strong concoction with that
total concentration of the veteran drunk. She did it
competently, and I sipped at the drink I hadn't really wanted.
"So. Name it, kiddo, and it's yours. Within reason."
"If you . . . let's say . . . if you wanted to have a
conversation with somebody, and you wanted to be sure no one
would overhear it . . . what would you do? How would you go
about it?"
She frowned and her brow furrowed. She appeared to be
thinking heavily, and her hand toyed with the layer of salt in
front of her.
"Now that's a good one. That's a real good one. I'm not
sure if anyone's ever asked me that before." She looked slowly
down at the salt, where her finger had traced out CC??. I
looked up at her, and nodded.
"You know what bugs are like these days. I'm not sure if
there's any place that can't be bugged. But I'll tell you what.
I know some techs back at the studio, they're real clever about
these things. I could ask them and get back to you." Her hand
had wiped out the original message and written p-suit. I nodded
again, and saw that while she was without a doubt very, very
drunk, she knew how to handle herself. There was a glint of
speculation in those eyes I wasn't sure I liked. I wondered
what I might be getting myself into.
We talked a while longer, and she wrote out a time and a
destination in the salt crystals. Then someone else sat next to
her and started fondling her breasts and she was showing a
definite interest, so I got up and returned to the dance floor.
I danced almost an hour longer, but my heart wasn't really
in it. A guy made a play for me, and he was pretty, and
persuasive, and a very good, raunchy dancer, but in the end I
felt he just didn't try hard enough. When I'm not the aggressor
I can choose to take a lot of persuading. In the end I gave him
my phone code and said call me in a week and we'd see, and got
the impression he probably wouldn't.
I showered and bought a paper chemise in the locker room,
staggered to the tube terminal, and got aboard. I fell asleep
on the way home, and the train had to wake me up.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
I've read about hangovers. You just about have to believe
those people were exaggerating. If only a tenth of the things
written about them were true, I have no desire to experience
one. The hangover was cured long before I was born, just a
simple chemical matter, really, no tough science involved. I'd
sometimes wondered if that was a good idea. There's an almost
biblical belief deep in the human psyche that we should pay in
some way for our over-indulgences. But when I think that, my
rational side soon takes over. Might as well wish for the
return of the hemorrhoid.
When I woke up the next morning, my mouth tasted good.
Too good.
"CC, on line," quoth I.
"What can I do for you?"
"What's with the peppermint?"
"I thought you liked peppermint. I can change the flavor."
"There's nothing wrong with peppermint qua peppermint.
It's just passing strange to wake up with my mouth tasting like
anything but . . . well, it wouldn't mean anything to you, I
don't guess taste is one of your talents, but take my word for
it, it's vile."
"You asked me to work on that. I did."
"Just like that?"
"Why not?"
I was about to answer, but Fox stirred in his sleep and
turned over, so I got out of bed and went into the bathroom. I
had shaken out a toothcleaning pill, then I looked at it
sitting there in my hand.
"Do I need this, then?"
"No. It's gone the way of the toothbrush."
"And science marches on. You know, I'm used to what they
call future shock, but I'm not used to being the cause of it."
"Humans usually are the cause of the new inventions."
"You said that."
"But you can never tell when a human will take the time to
work on a particular problem. Now, I have no talent for asking
questions like that. As you noted, my mouth never tastes bad in
the morning, so why should I? But I have a lot of excess
capacity, and when a question like that is asked, I often
tinker with it and sometimes come up with a solution. In this
case, I synthesized a nanobot that goes after the things that
would normally rot in your mouth while you are sleeping, and
changes them into things that taste good. They also clean away
plaque and tartar and have a beneficial effect on gums."
"I'm afraid to ask how you slipped this stuff to me."
"It's in the water supply. You don't need much of it."
"So every Lunarian is waking up today and tasting
peppermint?"
"It comes in six delicious flavors."
"Are you writing your own ad campaigns now? Do me a favor;
don't tell anyone this is my fault."
I got into the shower and it turned on, gradually warming
to just a degree below the hottest I could stand. Don't ever
say anything about showers, Hildy, I cautioned myself. The
goddam CC might find a way to clean the human hide without
them, and I think I'd go mad without my morning shower. I'm a
singer in the shower. Lovers have told me I do this with
indifferent esthetic effect, but it pleases me. As I soaped
myself I thought about a nanobot-infested world.
"CC. What would happen if all those tiny little robots
were taken out of my body?"
"Doing it would be impractical, to say the least."
"Hypothetically."
"You would be hypothetically dead within a year."
I dropped the soap. I don't know what answer I had
expected, but it hadn't been that.
"Are you serious?"
"You asked. I replied."
"Well . . . shit. You can't just leave it lying there."
"I suppose not. Then let me list the reasons in order.
First, you are prone to cancer. Billions of manufactured
organisms work night and day seeking out and eating pinpoint
tumors throughout your body. They find one almost every day. If
left unchecked, they would soon eat you alive. Second,
Alzheimer's Disease."
"What the hell is that?"
"A syndrome associated with aging. Simply put, it eats
away at your brain cells. Most human beings, upon reaching
their hundredth birthday in a natural state, would have
contracted it. This is an example of the reconstructive work
constantly going on in your body. Failing brain cells are
excised and duplicated with healthy ones so the neural net is
not disrupted. You would have forgotten your name and how to
find your way home years ago; the disease started showing up
about the time you went to work at the Nipple."
"Hah! Maybe those things didn't do as good a job as you
thought. That would go a long way toward explaining . . . never
mind. There's more?"
"Lung disease. The air in the warrens is not actually
healthy for human life. Things get concentrated, things that
could be cleaned from the air are not, because replacing lungs
is so much cheaper and simpler than cleaning up the air. You
could live in a disneyland to offset this; I must filter the
air much more rigorously in there. As it is, several hundred
alveoli are re-built in your lungs every day. Without the
nanobots, you'd soon begin to miss them."
"Why didn't anyone ever tell me about all this?"
"What does it matter? If you'd researched it you could
have found out; it's not a secret."
"Yeah, but . . . I thought those kind of things had been
engineered out of the body. Genetically."
"A popular misconception. Genes are certainly manipulable,
but they've proved resistant to some types of changes, without
. . . unacceptable alterations in the gestalt, the body, they
produce and define."
"Can you put that more plainly?"
"It's difficult. It can be explained in terms of some very
complicated mathematical theories having to do with chaotic
effects and chemical holography. There's often no single gene
for this or that characteristic, good or bad. It's more of an
interference pattern produced by the overlapping effects of a
number of genes, sometimes a very large number. Tampering with
one produces unintended side-effects, and tampering with them
all is often impossible without producing unwanted changes. Bad
genes are bound up this way as often as good ones. In your
case, if I eradicated the faulty genes that insist on producing
cancers in your body, you'd no longer be Hildy. You'd be a
healthier person, but not a wiser one, and you'd lose a lot of
abilities and outlooks that, counterproductive though they may
be in a purely practical sense, I suspect you treasure."
"What makes me me."
"Yes. You know there are many things I can change about
you without affecting your . . . soul is the simplest word to
use, though it's a hazy one."
"It's the first one you've used that I understand." I
chewed on that for a while, shutting off the shower and
stepping out, dripping wet, reaching for a towel, drying
myself.
"It doesn't make sense to me that things like cancer
should be in the genes. It sounds contrasurvival."
"From an evolutionary viewpoint, anything that doesn't
kill you before you've become old enough to reproduce is
irrelevant to species survival. There's even a philosophic
point of view that says cancer and things like it are good for
the race. Overpopulation can be a problem to a very successful
species. Cancer gets the old ones out of the way."
"They're not getting out the way now."
"No. It will be a problem someday."
"When?"
"Don't worry about it. Ask me again at the Tricentennial.
As a preliminary measure, large families are now being
discouraged, the direct opposite of the ethic that prevailed
after the Invasion."
I wanted to hear more, but I noticed the time, and had to
hustle to get ready in time to catch my train.
#
Tranquility Base is by far the biggest tourist attraction
on Luna, and the reason is its historical significance, since
it is the spot where a human foot first trod another planet.
Right? If you thought that, maybe I could interest you in some
prime real estate on Ganymede with a great view of the volcano.
The real draw at Tranquility is just over the horizon and goes
by the name of Armstrong Park. Since the park is within the
boundaries of Apollo Planetary Historical Preserve, the Lunar
Chamber of Commerce can boast that X million people visit the
site of the first Lunar landing every year, but the ads feature
the roller coaster, not the LEM.
A good number of those tourists do find the time to ride
the train over to the Base itself and spend a few minutes
gazing at the forlorn little lander, and an hour hurrying
through the nearby museum, where most of the derelict space
hardware from 1960 to the Invasion is on display. Then the kids
begin to whine that they're bored, and by then the parents
probably are, too, and it's back to the land of over-priced hot
dogs and not-socheap thrills.
You can't take a train directly to the base. No accident,
that. It dumps you at the foot of the thirty-story explosion of
lights that is the sign for and entrance to the Terminal
Seizure, what the ads call "The Greatest SphincterTightener in
the Known Universe." I got on it once, against my better
judgment, and I guarantee it will show you things they didn't
tell you about in astronaut school. It's a twenty-minute
MagLev, six-gee, free trajectory descent into the tenth circle
of Hell that guarantees one blackout and seven gray hairs or
your money back. It's actually two coasters--the Grand Mal and
the Petit Mal--one of them obviously for wimps. They are
prepared to hose out the Grand Mal cars after every ride. If
you understand the attraction of that, please don't come to my
home to explain it to me. I'm armed, and considered dangerous.
I walked as quickly as I could past the sign-30,000,000
(Count 'Em!) Thirty Million Lights!-and noticed the two-hour
line for the Grand Mal ride was cleverly concealed from the
ticket booth. I made it to the shuttle train, having
successfully avoided the blandishments of a thousand hucksters
selling everything from inflatable Neil dolls to talking
souvenir pencil sharpeners to put a point on your souvenir
pencils. I boarded the train, removed a hunk of cotton candy
from a seat, and sat. I was wearing a disposable paper jumper,
so what the hell?
The Base itself is an area large enough to play a game of
baseball/6. Those guys never got very far from their ship, so
it made no sense to preserve any more of the area. It is
surrounded by a stadium-like structure, un-roofed, that is four
levels of viewing area with all the windows facing inward. On
top is an un-pressurized level.
I elbowed my way through the throngs of cameratoting
tourists from Pluto and made it to the suit rental counter. Oh,
dear.
If I ever had to choose one sex to be for the rest of my
life, I would be female. I think the body is better-designed,
and the sex is a little better. But there is one thing about
the female body that is distinctly inferior to the male--and
I've talked to others about this, both Changers and dedicated
females, and ninety-five percent agree with me--and that is
urination. Males are simply better at it. It is less messy, the
position is more dignified, and the method helps develop
hand-eye coordination and a sense of artistic expression, a la
writing your name in the snow.
But what the hell, right? It's never really much of an
annoyance . . . until you go to rent a p-suit.
Almost three hundred years of engineering have come up
with three basic solutions to the problem: the catheter,
suction devices, and . . . oh, dear lord, the diaper. Some
advocate a fourth way: continence. Try it the next time you go
on a twelve-hour hike on the surface. The catheter was by far
the best. It is painless, as advertised . . . but I hate the
damn thing. It just feels wrong. Besides, like the suckers,
they get dislodged. Next time you need a laugh, watch a woman
trying to get her UroLator back in place. It could start a new
dance craze.
I've never owned a p-suit. Why spend the money, when you
need it once a year? I've rented a lot of them, and they all
stank. No matter how they are sterilized, some odors of the
previous occupant will linger. It's bad enough in a man's suit,
but for real gut-wrenching stench you have to put on the female
model. They all use the suction method, with a diaper as a
back-up. At a place like Tranquility, where the turnover is
rapid and the help likely to be under-paid, unconcerned, and
slipshod, some of the niceties will be overlooked from time to
time. I was once handed a suit that was still wet.
I got into this one and sniffed cautiously; not too bad,
though the perfume was cheap and obvious. I switched it on and
let the staff put it through a perfunctory safety check, and
remembered the other thing I didn't like about the suction
method. All that air flowing by can chill the vulva something
fierce.
There were surgical methods of improving the interface,
but I found them ugly, and they didn't make sense unless your
work took you outside regularly. The rest of us just had to
breathe shallowly and bear it, and try not to drink too much
coffee before an excursion.
The air lock delivered me onto the roof, which was not
crowded at all. I found a place at the rail far from anyone
else, and waited. I turned off my suit radio, all but the
emergency beacon.
I said, "CC, what do I get out of it?"
The CC is pretty good at picking up a conversation hours,
weeks, and even years old, but the question was pretty vague.
He took a stab at it.
"You mean the morning mouth preparation?"
"Yeah. I thought it up. You did the work, but then you
gave it away without consulting me. Shouldn't there be a way to
make some money out of it?"
"It's defined as a health benefit, so its production cost
will be added to the health tax all Lunarians pay, plus a small
profit, which will go to you. It won't make you rich."
"And no one gets to choose. They get it whether they like
it or not."
"If they object, I have an antibot available. No one has
so far."
"Still sounds like a subversive plot to me. If the
drinking water ain't pure, what is?"
"Hildy, there's so many things in the King City municipal
water you could practically lift it with a magnet."
"All for our own good."
"You seem to be in a sour mood."
"Why should I be? My mouth tastes wonderful."
"If you're interested, the approval ratings on this are
well over ninety-nine percent. The favorite flavor, however is
Neutral-with-a-Hint-ofMint. And an unforeseen side benefit is
that it works all day, cleaning your breath."
He'd beaten halitosis, I realized, glumly. How did I feel
about that? Shouldn't I be rejoicing? I recalled the way Liz's
breath had smelled last night, that sour reek of gin. Should a
drunk's breath smell like a puppy's tongue? I was sure as hell
being a crabby old woman about this, even I could see that. But
hell, I was an old woman, and often crabby. I'd found that as I
got older, I was less tolerant of change, for good or ill.
"How did you hear me?" I asked, before I could get too
gloomy thinking about a forever-changing world.
"The radio you switched off is suit-to-suit. Your suit
also monitors your vital signs, and transmits them if needed.
Using your access voice is defined as an emergency call, not
requiring aid."
"So I'm never out from under the protective umbrella of
your eternal vigilance."
"It keeps you safe," he said, and I told him to go away.
#
When Armstrong and Aldrin came in peace for all mankind,
it was envisioned that their landing site, in the vacuum of
space, would remain essentially unchanged for a million years,
if need be. Never mind that the exhaust of lift-off knocked the
flag over and tore a lot of the gold foil on the landing stage.
The footprints would still be there. And they are. Hundreds of
them, trampling a crazy pattern in the dust, going away from
the lander, coming back, none of them reaching as far as the
visitors' gallery. There are no other footprints to be seen.
The only change the museum curators worked at the site were to
set the flag back up, and suspend an ascentstage module about a
hundred feet above the landing stage, hanging from invisible
wires. It's not the Apollo 11 ascent stage; that one
crashlanded long ago.
Things are often not what they seem.
Nowhere in the free literature or the thousands of plaques
and audio-visual displays in the museum will you hear of the
night one hundred and eighty years ago when ten members of the
Delta Chi Delta fraternity, Luna University Chapter, came
around on their cycles. This was shortly after the Invasion,
and the site was not guarded as it is now. There had just been
a rope around the landing area, not even a visitors' center;
postInvasion Lunarians didn't have time for luxuries like that.
The Delts tipped the lander over and dragged it about
twenty feet. Their cycles wiped out most of the footprints.
They were going to steal the flag and take it back to their
dorm, but one of them fell off his mount, cracked his
faceplate, and went to that great pledge party in the sky.
Psuits were not as safe then as they are now. Horseplay in a
p-suit was not a good idea.
But not to worry. Tranquility Base was one of the most
documented places in the history of history. Tens of thousands
of photos existed, including very detailed shots from orbit.
Teams of selenolography students spent a year restoring the
Base. Each square meter was scrutinized, debates raged about
the order in which footprints had been laid down, then two guys
went out there and tromped around with replica Apollo
moonboots, each step measured by laser, and were hauled out on
a winch when they were through. Presto! An historical
re-creation passing as the real thing. This is not a secret,
but very few people know about it. Look it up.
I felt a hand flip the radio switch on my suit back on.
"Fancy meeting you here," Liz said.
"Quite a coincidence," I said, thinking about the CC
listening in. She joined me, leaning on the railing and looking
out over the plain. Behind the far wall of the round visitors'
gallery I could see thousands of people looking toward us
through the glass.
"I come here a lot," she said. "Would you travel a
half-million miles in a tinfoil toy like that?"
"I wouldn't go half a meter in it. I'd rather travel by
pogo stick."
"They were real men in those days. Have you ever thought
about it? What it must have been like? They could barely turn
around in that thing. One of them made it back with half the
ship blown up."
"Yeah. I have thought about it. Maybe not as much as you."
"Think about this, then. You know who the real hero was?
In my opinion? Good old Mike Collins, the poor sap who stayed
in orbit. Whoever designed this operation didn't think it out.
Say something went wrong, say the lander crashes and these two
die instantly. There's Collins up in orbit, all by himself. How
are you gonna deal with that? No ticker-tape parade for Mike.
He gets to attend the memorial service, and spend the rest of
his life wishing he'd died with them. He gets to be a national
goat, is what he gets."
"I hadn't thought of that."
"So things go right--and they did, though I'll never
understand how--so who does the Planetary Park get named after?
Why, the guy who flubbed his 'first words' from the surface."
"I thought that was a garbled transmission."
"Don't you believe it. 'Course, if I'd had two billion
people listening in, I might have fucked it up, too. That part
was probably scarier than the thought of dying, anyway, having
everybody watching you die, and hoping that if it did go
rotten, it wouldn't be your fault. This little exercise cost
twenty, thirty billion dollars, and that was back when a
billion was real money."
It was still real money to me, but I let her ramble on.
This was her show; she'd brought me here, knowing only that I
was interested in telling her something in a place where the CC
couldn't overhear. I was in her hands.
"Let's go for a walk," she said, and started off. I
hurried to catch up with her, followed her down several flights
of stairs to the surface.
You can cover a lot of ground on the surface in a fairly
short time. The best gait is a hop from the ball of the foot,
swinging each leg out slightly to the side. There's no point in
jumping too high, it just wastes energy.
I know there are still places on Luna where the virgin
dust stretches as far as the eye can see. Not many, but a few.
The mineral wealth of my home planet is not great, and all the
interesting places have been identified and mapped from orbit,
so there's little incentive to visit some of the more remote
regions. By remote, I mean far from the centers of human
habitation; any spot on Luna is easily reachable by a lander or
crawler.
Everywhere I'd ever been on the surface looked much like
the land around Tranquility Base, covered with so many tracks
you wondered where the big crowd had gone, since there was
likely to be not a single soul in sight but whatever companions
you were traveling with. Nothing ever goes away on Luna. It has
been continuously inhabited by humans for almost two and a half
centuries. Every time someone has taken a stroll or dropped an
empty oxygen tank the evidence is still there, so a place that
got two visitors every three or four years looks like hundreds
of people have gone by just a few minutes before. Tranquility
got considerably more than that. There was not a square
millimeter of undisturbed dust, and the litter was so thick it
had been kicked into heaps here and there. I saw empty beer
cans with labels a hundred and fifty years old lying next to
some they were currently selling in Armstrong Park.
After a bit some of that thinned out. The tracks tended to
group themselves into impromptu trails. I guess humans tend to
follow the herd, even when the herd is gone and the land is so
flat it doesn't matter where you go.
"You left too early last night," Liz said, the radio
making it sound as if she was standing beside me when I could
see her twenty meters in front. "There was some excitement."
"I thought it was pretty exciting while I was there."
"Then you must have seen the Duke of Bosnia tangling with
the punchbowl."
"No, I missed that. But I tangled with him earlier."
"That was you? Then it's your fault. He was in a foul
mood. Apparently you didn't mark him enough; he figures if he
hasn't lost a kilo or two of flesh after pounding the sheets,
somebody just wasn't trying."
"He didn't complain."
"He wouldn't. I swear, I think I'm related to him, but
that man is so stupid, he hasn't got the brains God gave a
left-handed screwdriver. After you went home he got drunk as a
waltzing pissant and decided somebody had put poison in the
punch, so he tipped it over and picked it up and started
banging people over the head with it. I had to come over and
coldcock him."
"You do give interesting parties."
"Ain't it the truth? But that's not what I was gonna tell
you about. We were having so much fun we completely forgot
about the gifts, so I gathered everybody around and started
opening them."
"You get anything nice?"
"Well, a few had the sense to tape the receipt to the box.
I'll clear a little money on that. So I got to one that said it
was from the Earl of Donegal, which should have tipped me off,
but what do I know about the goddam United Kingdom? I thought
it was a province of Wales, or something. I knew I didn't know
the guy, but who can keep track? I opened it, and it was from
the Irish Republican Pranksters."
"Oh, no."
"The hereditary enemies of my clan. Next thing I know
we're all covered with this green stuff, I don't wanna know
where it came from, but I know what it smelled like. And that
was the end of that party. Just as well. I had to mail half the
guests home, anyway."
"I hate those jerks. On St. Patrick's day you don't dare
sit down without looking for a green whoopee cushion."
"You think you got it bad? Every mick in King City comes
gunning for me on the seventeenth of March, so they can tell
their buddies how they put one over on the bleedin' Princess o'
Wales. And it's only gonna get worse now."
"Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown."
"I'll crown 'em, all right. I know where Paddy Flynn
lives, and I'm gonna get even if it harelips the Mayor and the
party in progress spilled into the hall.
Liz had managed a pretty good turn-out. Too bad she
couldn't have afforded to hire a bigger hall. People were
standing elbow to elbow, trying to balance tiny plates of
olives and crackers with cheese and anchovy paste in one hand
and paper cups of punch and champagne in the other while being
jostled from all sides. I sidled my way to the food, as is my
wont when it's free, and scanned it dubiously. UniBio set a
better table, I must say. Drinks were being poured by two men
in the most outrageous outfits. I won't even attempt to
describe them. I later learned they were called Beefeaters, for
reasons that will remain forever obscure to me.
Not that my own clothes were anything to shout about.
She'd said semi-formal, so I could have gotten away with just
the gray fedora and the press pass stuck in the brim. But upon
reflection I decided to go with the whole silly ensemble,
handing the baggy pants and double-breasted suit coat to the
auto-valet with barely enough time for alterations. I left the
seat and the legs loose and didn't button the coat; that was
part of the look my guild, in its infinite wisdom, had voted on
almost two hundred years ago when professional uniforms were
being chosen. It had been taken from newspaper movies of the
1930's. I'd viewed a lot of them, and was amused at the image
my fellow reporters apparently wanted to project at formal
events: rumpled, aggressive, brash, impolite, wise-cracking,
but with hearts o' gold when the goin' got tough. Sure, and it
made yer heart proud ta be a reporter, by the saints. For a
little fun, I'd worn a white blouse with a bunch of lace at the
neck instead of the regulation ornamental noose known as a
neck-tie. And I'd tied my hair up and stuffed it under the hat.
In the mirror I'd looked just like Kate Hepburn masquerading as
a boy, at least from the neck up. From there down the suit hung
on me like a tent, but such was the cunning architecture of my
new body that anything looked good on it. I'd saluted my image
in the mirror: here's lookin' at you, Bobbie.
Liz spotted me and made her way toward me with a shout.
She was already half looped. If her late mother had given her
nothing else, she had seemingly inherited his taste for the
demon rum. She embraced me and thanked me for coming, then
swirled off again into the crowd. Well, I'd corner her later,
after the ceremony, if she could still stand up by then.
What followed hasn't changed much in four or five hundred
years. For almost an hour people kept arriving, including the
hotel manager who had a hasty conference with Liz--concerning
her credit rating, I expect--and then opened the connecting
door to Suite #1, which relieved the pressure for a while. The
food and champagne ran out, and was replenished. Liz didn't
care about the cost. This was her day. It was your
proto-typical daytime party.
I met several people I knew, was introduced to dozens
whose names I promptly forgot. Among my new friends were the
Shaka of the Zulu Nation, the Emperor of Japan, the Maharajah
of Gujarat, and the Tsarina of All the Russias, or at least
people in silly costumes who styled themselves that way. Also
countless Counts, Caliphs, Archdukes, Satraps, Sheiks and
Nabobs. Who was I to dispute their titles? There had been a
vogue in such genealogy about the time Callie had grudgingly
expelled my ungrateful squalling form into a lessthan
overwhelmed world; Callie had even told me she thought she
might be related to Mussolini, on her mother's side. Did that
make me the heirapparent of Il Duce? It wasn't a burning
question to me. I overheard intense debates about the rules of
primogeniture--even Salic Law, of all things--in an age of sex
changing. Someone--I think it was the Duke of York--gave me a
lecture about it shortly before the ceremony, explaining why
Liz was inheritor to the throne, even though she had a younger
brother.
After escaping from that with most of my wits intact, I
found myself out on the balcony, nursing a strawberry
Margarita. Howard's had a view, but it was of the cargo side of
the spaceport. I looked out over the beached-whale hulks of
bulk carriers expelling their interplanetary burdens into
waiting underground tanks. I was almost alone, which puzzled me
for a moment, until I remembered a story I'd seen about how
many people had suddenly lost their taste for surface views in
the wake of the Kansas Collapse. I drained my drink, reached
out and tapped the invisible curved canopy that held vacuum at
bay, and shrugged. Somehow I didn't think I'd die in a blowout.
I had worse things to fear.
Somebody held out another pink drink with salt on the rum.
I took it and looked over and up--and up and up--into the
smiling face of Brenda, girl reporter and apprentice giraffe. I
toasted her.
"Didn't expect to see you here," I said.
"I got acquainted with the Princess after your . . .
accident."
"That was no accident."
She prattled on about what a nice party it was. I didn't
disillusion her. Wait till she'd attended a few thousand more
just like it, then she'd see.
I'd been curious what Brenda's reaction would be to my new
sex. To my chagrin, she was delighted. I got the skinney from a
homo-oriented friend at the fashion desk: Brenda was young
enough to still be exploring her own sexuality, discovering her
preferences. She'd already been pretty sure she leaned toward
females as lovers, at least when she was a woman. Discovering
her preferences as a male would have to wait for her first
Change. After all, until quite recently she'd been effectively
neuter. The only problem she'd had in her crush on me was that
she wasn't much attracted to males. She had thought it would
remain platonic until I thoughtfully made everything perfect by
showing up at work as my gorgeous new self.
I really, really didn't have the heart to tell her about
my preferences.
And I did owe her. She had been covering for me, putting
my by-line on the Invasion Bicentennial stories she was
writing, the stories I simply could no longer bring myself to
work on. Oh, I was helping, answering her questions, going over
her drafts, punching up the prose, showing her how to leave
just enough excess baggage in the stories so Walter would have
something to cut out and shout at her about and thus remain a
happy man. I think Walter was beginning to suspect what was
going on, but he hadn't said anything yet because expecting me
to cover the Collapse and get in our weekly feature was unfair,
and he knew it. The thing he should have foreseen before he
ever came up with his cockamamie Invasion series was that there
would always be a story like the Collapse happening, and as a
good editor he had to assign his best people to it, which
included me. Oh, yeah, if you wanted somebody to intrude on
grief and ogle bodies puffed up like pink and brown popcorn,
Hildy was your girl.
"Tell me, sweetheart, how did you feel when you saw the
man cut your daddy's head off?"
"What?" Brenda was looking at me strangely.
"It's the essential disaster/atrocity question," I said.
"They don't tell you that in Journalism 101, but all the
questions we ask, no matter how delicately phrased, boil down
to that. The idea is to get the first appearance of the tear,
the ineffable moment when the face twists up. That's gold,
honey. You'd better learn how to mine it."
"I don't think that's true."
"Then you'll never be a great reporter. Maybe you should
try social work."
I saw that I had hurt her, and it made me angry, both at
her and at myself. She had to understand these things, dammit.
But who appointed you, Hildy? She'll find out soon enough, as
soon as Walter takes her off these damn comparative
anthropology stories that our readers don't even want to see
and lets her get out where she can grub in the dirt like the
rest of us.
I realized I'd drunk a little more than I had intended. I
dumped the rest of my drink in a thirsty-looking potted plant,
snagged a coke from a passing tray, and performed a little
ritual I'd come to detest but was powerless to stop. It
consisted of a series of questions, like this: Do you feel the
urge to hurl yourself off this balcony, assuming you could
drill a hole through that ultralexan barrier? No. Great, but do
you want to throw a rope over that beam and haul yourself up
into the rafters? Not today, thank you. And so on.
I was about to say something nice and neutral and
soothing, suitable for the reassurance of idealistic cub
reporters, when the Jamaican steel band which had been
reprising every patriotic British song since the Spanish Armada
suddenly struck up God Save The Queen, and somebody asked
everyone to haul their drunken asses down to the main ballroom,
where the coronation was about to commence. Not in those words,
of course.
#
There was another band in the ballroom, playing some
horrible modern version of Rule Britannia. This was the public
portion of the show, and I guess Liz thought it ought to make
some attempt to appeal to the tastes of the day. I thought the
music was dreadful, but Brenda was snapping her fingers, so I
suppose it was at least current.
A few specialty channels and some of the 'pads had sent
reporters, but the crowd in the ballroom was essentially the
same folks I'd been avoiding up in the Suites one and two, only
they weren't holding drinks. A lot of them looked as if they
wished the show would hurry up, so they could hold drinks
again, for a short time, at least.
One touch Liz hadn't expected was the decorations. From
the whispers I overheard, she'd only booked the hall for one
hour. When the coronation was over a wedding party was
scheduled to hold a reception there, so the walls were draped
in white bunting and repulsive little cherubs, and there was a
big sign hung on the wall that said Mazel Tov! Liz looked a
little nonplussed. She glanced around with that baffled
expression one sometimes gets after wandering into a strange
place. Could there have been a mistake?
But the coronation itself went off without a hitch. She
was proclaimed "Elizabeth III, by the Grace of God of the
United Kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland
and of her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Empress of
India, Head of the Commonwealth and Defender of the Faith."
Sure, it was easy to snicker, and I did, but to myself. I
could see that Liz took it seriously, almost in spite of
herself. No matter how spurious the claims of some of these
other clowns might have been to ancient titles, Liz's was
spotless and unquestioned. The actual Prince of Wales had been
living and working on Luna at the time of the Invasion, and she
was descended from him.
The original Crown Jewels had naturally not accompanied
the King in Exile to Luna; they were buried with the rest of
London--of England, of Europe, of the whole surface of Planet
Earth. Liz had the use of a very nice crown, orb, and sceptre.
Hovering in the background as these items were produced was a
man from Tiffany's. Not the one in the Platz, but the discount
outlet down on Leystrasse, where even as the tiara was lowered
onto Liz's head a sign was going up announcing "By Appointment
to Her Majesty, The Queen." The jewels were hired, and would
soon reside in a window advertising the usual E-Z Credit Terms.
A procession was traditional after a coronation back when
the Empire had any real meaning--and even after it had become
just a tourist attraction. But processions can be difficult to
organize in the warrens of Luna, where the cities are usually
broken up into pressure-defensible malls and arcades connected
by tube trains. So after the ceremony we all straggled into a
succession of subway cars and zipped across town to Liz's
neighborhood, many of us growing steadily more sober and unsure
why we'd come in the first place.
But all was well. The real party began when we arrived at
the post-coronation reception, held in the Masonic Lodge Hall
half-way between Liz's apartment and the studio where she
worked. In addition to its many other virtues the lodge didn't
cost her anything, which meant she could spend what royal
budget she had left entirely on food, booze, and entertainment.
This bash was informal and relaxed, the only kind I enjoy.
The band was good, playing a preponderance of things from Liz's
teenage years, which put them mid-way between my era and
Brenda's. It was stuff I could dance to. So I stumbled out into
the public corridor in my twotone Oxford lace-ups--and a
clunkier shoe has never been invented--found a mail box and
called my valet. I told it to pack up the drop-dead shiny black
sheath dress slit from the ankles to you-should-only-blush and
'tube it over to me. I went into the public comfort station and
changed my hair color to platinum and put a long wave in it,
and when I came out, three minutes later, the package was
waiting for me. I stripped out of the Halloween costume and
stuffed it into the return capsule, cajoled my abundance into
the outfit's parsimonious interior. Just getting into that
thing was almost enough to give you an orgasm. I left my feet
bare. And to hell with Kate Hepburn; Veronica Lake was on the
prowl.
I danced almost non-stop for two hours. I had one dance
with Liz, but she was naturally much in demand. I danced with
Brenda, who was a very good if visually unlikely terpsichorean.
Mostly I danced with a succession of men, and I turned down a
dozen interesting offers. I'd selected my eventual target, but
I was in no hurry unless he suddenly decided to leave.
He didn't. When I was ready I cut him out of the herd. I
put a few moves on him, mostly in the form of dance steps whose
meaning couldn't have been missed by a eunuch. He wanted to
join the rather sparsely-attended orgy going on in one corner
of the ballroom, but I dragged him off to what the Masons
called, too coyly in my opinion, snuggle rooms. We spent a very
enjoyable hour in one of them. He liked to be spanked, and
bitten. It's not my thing, but I can accommodate most
consenting adults as long as my needs are attended to as well.
He did a very good job of that. His name was Larry, and he
claimed to be the Duke of Bosnia-Herzegovina, but that might
have been just to get into my pants. The couple of times I drew
blood he asked me to do it again, so I did, but eventually lost
my . . . well, my taste for that sort of thing. We exchanged
phone codes and said we'd look each other up, but I didn't
intend to. He was nice to look at but I felt I'd chewed off
about as much as I wanted.
I staggered back into the ballroom drenched in sweat. It
had been very intense there for a while. I headed for the bar,
dodging dancers. The faint-hearted had left, leaving about half
the original attendees, but those looked ready to party till
Monday morning. I eased my pinkened, pleasantly sore cheeks
onto a padded barstool next to the Queen of England, the
Empress of India, and the Defender of the Faith, and Liz slowly
turned her head toward me. I now knew where her impressive ears
came from. There were posters of past monarchs taped to the
walls here, and she was the spitting image of Charles III.
"Innkeeper," she shouted, above the music. "Bring me salt.
Bring me tequila. Bring me the nectar of the lime, your
plumpest strawberries, your coldest ice, your finest crystal.
My friend needs a drink, and I intend to build it for her."
"Ain't got no strawberries," the bartender said.
"Then go out and kill some!"
"It's all right, Your Majesty," I said. "Lime will be
fine."
She grinned foolishly at me. "I purely do like the sound
of that. 'Your Majesty.' Is that awful?"
"You're entitled, as they say. But don't expect me to make
a habit of it." She draped an arm over my shoulder and exhaled
ethanol.
"How are you, Hildy? Having a good time? Getting laid?"
"Just did, thank you."
"Don't thank me. And you look it, honey, if I may say so."
"Didn't have time to freshen up yet."
"You don't need to. Who did the work?"
I showed her the monogram on the nail of my pinkie. She
squinted at it, and seemed to lose interest, which might have
meant that Bobbie's fears of falling out of fashion were
well-grounded-- Liz would be up on these things--or only that
her attention span was not what it might be.
"What was I gonna say? Oh, yeah. Can I do anything for
you, Hildy? There's a tradition among my people . . . well,
maybe it's not an English tradition, but it's somebody's damn
tradition, what you gotta do is, anybody asks you for a favor
on your coronation day, you gotta grant it."
"I think that's a Mafia tradition."
"Is it? Well, it's your people, then. So just ask. Only be
real, okay? I mean, if it's gonna cost a lot of money, forget
it. I'm gonna be payin' for this fucking shivaree for the next
ten fucking years. But that's okay. It's only money, right? And
what a party. Am I right?
"As a matter of fact, there is something you could do for
me."
I was about to tell her, but the bartender delivered a
Margarita in its component parts, and Liz could only think
about one thing at a time. She spilled a lot of salt on the
bar, spread it out, moistened the rim of a wide glass, and did
things necessary to produce a too-strong concoction with that
total concentration of the veteran drunk. She did it
competently, and I sipped at the drink I hadn't really wanted.
"So. Name it, kiddo, and it's yours. Within reason."
"If you . . . let's say . . . if you wanted to have a
conversation with somebody, and you wanted to be sure no one
would overhear it . . . what would you do? How would you go
about it?"
She frowned and her brow furrowed. She appeared to be
thinking heavily, and her hand toyed with the layer of salt in
front of her.
"Now that's a good one. That's a real good one. I'm not
sure if anyone's ever asked me that before." She looked slowly
down at the salt, where her finger had traced out CC??. I
looked up at her, and nodded.
"You know what bugs are like these days. I'm not sure if
there's any place that can't be bugged. But I'll tell you what.
I know some techs back at the studio, they're real clever about
these things. I could ask them and get back to you." Her hand
had wiped out the original message and written p-suit. I nodded
again, and saw that while she was without a doubt very, very
drunk, she knew how to handle herself. There was a glint of
speculation in those eyes I wasn't sure I liked. I wondered
what I might be getting myself into.
We talked a while longer, and she wrote out a time and a
destination in the salt crystals. Then someone else sat next to
her and started fondling her breasts and she was showing a
definite interest, so I got up and returned to the dance floor.
I danced almost an hour longer, but my heart wasn't really
in it. A guy made a play for me, and he was pretty, and
persuasive, and a very good, raunchy dancer, but in the end I
felt he just didn't try hard enough. When I'm not the aggressor
I can choose to take a lot of persuading. In the end I gave him
my phone code and said call me in a week and we'd see, and got
the impression he probably wouldn't.
I showered and bought a paper chemise in the locker room,
staggered to the tube terminal, and got aboard. I fell asleep
on the way home, and the train had to wake me up.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
I've read about hangovers. You just about have to believe
those people were exaggerating. If only a tenth of the things
written about them were true, I have no desire to experience
one. The hangover was cured long before I was born, just a
simple chemical matter, really, no tough science involved. I'd
sometimes wondered if that was a good idea. There's an almost
biblical belief deep in the human psyche that we should pay in
some way for our over-indulgences. But when I think that, my
rational side soon takes over. Might as well wish for the
return of the hemorrhoid.
When I woke up the next morning, my mouth tasted good.
Too good.
"CC, on line," quoth I.
"What can I do for you?"
"What's with the peppermint?"
"I thought you liked peppermint. I can change the flavor."
"There's nothing wrong with peppermint qua peppermint.
It's just passing strange to wake up with my mouth tasting like
anything but . . . well, it wouldn't mean anything to you, I
don't guess taste is one of your talents, but take my word for
it, it's vile."
"You asked me to work on that. I did."
"Just like that?"
"Why not?"
I was about to answer, but Fox stirred in his sleep and
turned over, so I got out of bed and went into the bathroom. I
had shaken out a toothcleaning pill, then I looked at it
sitting there in my hand.
"Do I need this, then?"
"No. It's gone the way of the toothbrush."
"And science marches on. You know, I'm used to what they
call future shock, but I'm not used to being the cause of it."
"Humans usually are the cause of the new inventions."
"You said that."
"But you can never tell when a human will take the time to
work on a particular problem. Now, I have no talent for asking
questions like that. As you noted, my mouth never tastes bad in
the morning, so why should I? But I have a lot of excess
capacity, and when a question like that is asked, I often
tinker with it and sometimes come up with a solution. In this
case, I synthesized a nanobot that goes after the things that
would normally rot in your mouth while you are sleeping, and
changes them into things that taste good. They also clean away
plaque and tartar and have a beneficial effect on gums."
"I'm afraid to ask how you slipped this stuff to me."
"It's in the water supply. You don't need much of it."
"So every Lunarian is waking up today and tasting
peppermint?"
"It comes in six delicious flavors."
"Are you writing your own ad campaigns now? Do me a favor;
don't tell anyone this is my fault."
I got into the shower and it turned on, gradually warming
to just a degree below the hottest I could stand. Don't ever
say anything about showers, Hildy, I cautioned myself. The
goddam CC might find a way to clean the human hide without
them, and I think I'd go mad without my morning shower. I'm a
singer in the shower. Lovers have told me I do this with
indifferent esthetic effect, but it pleases me. As I soaped
myself I thought about a nanobot-infested world.
"CC. What would happen if all those tiny little robots
were taken out of my body?"
"Doing it would be impractical, to say the least."
"Hypothetically."
"You would be hypothetically dead within a year."
I dropped the soap. I don't know what answer I had
expected, but it hadn't been that.
"Are you serious?"
"You asked. I replied."
"Well . . . shit. You can't just leave it lying there."
"I suppose not. Then let me list the reasons in order.
First, you are prone to cancer. Billions of manufactured
organisms work night and day seeking out and eating pinpoint
tumors throughout your body. They find one almost every day. If
left unchecked, they would soon eat you alive. Second,
Alzheimer's Disease."
"What the hell is that?"
"A syndrome associated with aging. Simply put, it eats
away at your brain cells. Most human beings, upon reaching
their hundredth birthday in a natural state, would have
contracted it. This is an example of the reconstructive work
constantly going on in your body. Failing brain cells are
excised and duplicated with healthy ones so the neural net is
not disrupted. You would have forgotten your name and how to
find your way home years ago; the disease started showing up
about the time you went to work at the Nipple."
"Hah! Maybe those things didn't do as good a job as you
thought. That would go a long way toward explaining . . . never
mind. There's more?"
"Lung disease. The air in the warrens is not actually
healthy for human life. Things get concentrated, things that
could be cleaned from the air are not, because replacing lungs
is so much cheaper and simpler than cleaning up the air. You
could live in a disneyland to offset this; I must filter the
air much more rigorously in there. As it is, several hundred
alveoli are re-built in your lungs every day. Without the
nanobots, you'd soon begin to miss them."
"Why didn't anyone ever tell me about all this?"
"What does it matter? If you'd researched it you could
have found out; it's not a secret."
"Yeah, but . . . I thought those kind of things had been
engineered out of the body. Genetically."
"A popular misconception. Genes are certainly manipulable,
but they've proved resistant to some types of changes, without
. . . unacceptable alterations in the gestalt, the body, they
produce and define."
"Can you put that more plainly?"
"It's difficult. It can be explained in terms of some very
complicated mathematical theories having to do with chaotic
effects and chemical holography. There's often no single gene
for this or that characteristic, good or bad. It's more of an
interference pattern produced by the overlapping effects of a
number of genes, sometimes a very large number. Tampering with
one produces unintended side-effects, and tampering with them
all is often impossible without producing unwanted changes. Bad
genes are bound up this way as often as good ones. In your
case, if I eradicated the faulty genes that insist on producing
cancers in your body, you'd no longer be Hildy. You'd be a
healthier person, but not a wiser one, and you'd lose a lot of
abilities and outlooks that, counterproductive though they may
be in a purely practical sense, I suspect you treasure."
"What makes me me."
"Yes. You know there are many things I can change about
you without affecting your . . . soul is the simplest word to
use, though it's a hazy one."
"It's the first one you've used that I understand." I
chewed on that for a while, shutting off the shower and
stepping out, dripping wet, reaching for a towel, drying
myself.
"It doesn't make sense to me that things like cancer
should be in the genes. It sounds contrasurvival."
"From an evolutionary viewpoint, anything that doesn't
kill you before you've become old enough to reproduce is
irrelevant to species survival. There's even a philosophic
point of view that says cancer and things like it are good for
the race. Overpopulation can be a problem to a very successful
species. Cancer gets the old ones out of the way."
"They're not getting out the way now."
"No. It will be a problem someday."
"When?"
"Don't worry about it. Ask me again at the Tricentennial.
As a preliminary measure, large families are now being
discouraged, the direct opposite of the ethic that prevailed
after the Invasion."
I wanted to hear more, but I noticed the time, and had to
hustle to get ready in time to catch my train.
#
Tranquility Base is by far the biggest tourist attraction
on Luna, and the reason is its historical significance, since
it is the spot where a human foot first trod another planet.
Right? If you thought that, maybe I could interest you in some
prime real estate on Ganymede with a great view of the volcano.
The real draw at Tranquility is just over the horizon and goes
by the name of Armstrong Park. Since the park is within the
boundaries of Apollo Planetary Historical Preserve, the Lunar
Chamber of Commerce can boast that X million people visit the
site of the first Lunar landing every year, but the ads feature
the roller coaster, not the LEM.
A good number of those tourists do find the time to ride
the train over to the Base itself and spend a few minutes
gazing at the forlorn little lander, and an hour hurrying
through the nearby museum, where most of the derelict space
hardware from 1960 to the Invasion is on display. Then the kids
begin to whine that they're bored, and by then the parents
probably are, too, and it's back to the land of over-priced hot
dogs and not-socheap thrills.
You can't take a train directly to the base. No accident,
that. It dumps you at the foot of the thirty-story explosion of
lights that is the sign for and entrance to the Terminal
Seizure, what the ads call "The Greatest SphincterTightener in
the Known Universe." I got on it once, against my better
judgment, and I guarantee it will show you things they didn't
tell you about in astronaut school. It's a twenty-minute
MagLev, six-gee, free trajectory descent into the tenth circle
of Hell that guarantees one blackout and seven gray hairs or
your money back. It's actually two coasters--the Grand Mal and
the Petit Mal--one of them obviously for wimps. They are
prepared to hose out the Grand Mal cars after every ride. If
you understand the attraction of that, please don't come to my
home to explain it to me. I'm armed, and considered dangerous.
I walked as quickly as I could past the sign-30,000,000
(Count 'Em!) Thirty Million Lights!-and noticed the two-hour
line for the Grand Mal ride was cleverly concealed from the
ticket booth. I made it to the shuttle train, having
successfully avoided the blandishments of a thousand hucksters
selling everything from inflatable Neil dolls to talking
souvenir pencil sharpeners to put a point on your souvenir
pencils. I boarded the train, removed a hunk of cotton candy
from a seat, and sat. I was wearing a disposable paper jumper,
so what the hell?
The Base itself is an area large enough to play a game of
baseball/6. Those guys never got very far from their ship, so
it made no sense to preserve any more of the area. It is
surrounded by a stadium-like structure, un-roofed, that is four
levels of viewing area with all the windows facing inward. On
top is an un-pressurized level.
I elbowed my way through the throngs of cameratoting
tourists from Pluto and made it to the suit rental counter. Oh,
dear.
If I ever had to choose one sex to be for the rest of my
life, I would be female. I think the body is better-designed,
and the sex is a little better. But there is one thing about
the female body that is distinctly inferior to the male--and
I've talked to others about this, both Changers and dedicated
females, and ninety-five percent agree with me--and that is
urination. Males are simply better at it. It is less messy, the
position is more dignified, and the method helps develop
hand-eye coordination and a sense of artistic expression, a la
writing your name in the snow.
But what the hell, right? It's never really much of an
annoyance . . . until you go to rent a p-suit.
Almost three hundred years of engineering have come up
with three basic solutions to the problem: the catheter,
suction devices, and . . . oh, dear lord, the diaper. Some
advocate a fourth way: continence. Try it the next time you go
on a twelve-hour hike on the surface. The catheter was by far
the best. It is painless, as advertised . . . but I hate the
damn thing. It just feels wrong. Besides, like the suckers,
they get dislodged. Next time you need a laugh, watch a woman
trying to get her UroLator back in place. It could start a new
dance craze.
I've never owned a p-suit. Why spend the money, when you
need it once a year? I've rented a lot of them, and they all
stank. No matter how they are sterilized, some odors of the
previous occupant will linger. It's bad enough in a man's suit,
but for real gut-wrenching stench you have to put on the female
model. They all use the suction method, with a diaper as a
back-up. At a place like Tranquility, where the turnover is
rapid and the help likely to be under-paid, unconcerned, and
slipshod, some of the niceties will be overlooked from time to
time. I was once handed a suit that was still wet.
I got into this one and sniffed cautiously; not too bad,
though the perfume was cheap and obvious. I switched it on and
let the staff put it through a perfunctory safety check, and
remembered the other thing I didn't like about the suction
method. All that air flowing by can chill the vulva something
fierce.
There were surgical methods of improving the interface,
but I found them ugly, and they didn't make sense unless your
work took you outside regularly. The rest of us just had to
breathe shallowly and bear it, and try not to drink too much
coffee before an excursion.
The air lock delivered me onto the roof, which was not
crowded at all. I found a place at the rail far from anyone
else, and waited. I turned off my suit radio, all but the
emergency beacon.
I said, "CC, what do I get out of it?"
The CC is pretty good at picking up a conversation hours,
weeks, and even years old, but the question was pretty vague.
He took a stab at it.
"You mean the morning mouth preparation?"
"Yeah. I thought it up. You did the work, but then you
gave it away without consulting me. Shouldn't there be a way to
make some money out of it?"
"It's defined as a health benefit, so its production cost
will be added to the health tax all Lunarians pay, plus a small
profit, which will go to you. It won't make you rich."
"And no one gets to choose. They get it whether they like
it or not."
"If they object, I have an antibot available. No one has
so far."
"Still sounds like a subversive plot to me. If the
drinking water ain't pure, what is?"
"Hildy, there's so many things in the King City municipal
water you could practically lift it with a magnet."
"All for our own good."
"You seem to be in a sour mood."
"Why should I be? My mouth tastes wonderful."
"If you're interested, the approval ratings on this are
well over ninety-nine percent. The favorite flavor, however is
Neutral-with-a-Hint-ofMint. And an unforeseen side benefit is
that it works all day, cleaning your breath."
He'd beaten halitosis, I realized, glumly. How did I feel
about that? Shouldn't I be rejoicing? I recalled the way Liz's
breath had smelled last night, that sour reek of gin. Should a
drunk's breath smell like a puppy's tongue? I was sure as hell
being a crabby old woman about this, even I could see that. But
hell, I was an old woman, and often crabby. I'd found that as I
got older, I was less tolerant of change, for good or ill.
"How did you hear me?" I asked, before I could get too
gloomy thinking about a forever-changing world.
"The radio you switched off is suit-to-suit. Your suit
also monitors your vital signs, and transmits them if needed.
Using your access voice is defined as an emergency call, not
requiring aid."
"So I'm never out from under the protective umbrella of
your eternal vigilance."
"It keeps you safe," he said, and I told him to go away.
#
When Armstrong and Aldrin came in peace for all mankind,
it was envisioned that their landing site, in the vacuum of
space, would remain essentially unchanged for a million years,
if need be. Never mind that the exhaust of lift-off knocked the
flag over and tore a lot of the gold foil on the landing stage.
The footprints would still be there. And they are. Hundreds of
them, trampling a crazy pattern in the dust, going away from
the lander, coming back, none of them reaching as far as the
visitors' gallery. There are no other footprints to be seen.
The only change the museum curators worked at the site were to
set the flag back up, and suspend an ascentstage module about a
hundred feet above the landing stage, hanging from invisible
wires. It's not the Apollo 11 ascent stage; that one
crashlanded long ago.
Things are often not what they seem.
Nowhere in the free literature or the thousands of plaques
and audio-visual displays in the museum will you hear of the
night one hundred and eighty years ago when ten members of the
Delta Chi Delta fraternity, Luna University Chapter, came
around on their cycles. This was shortly after the Invasion,
and the site was not guarded as it is now. There had just been
a rope around the landing area, not even a visitors' center;
postInvasion Lunarians didn't have time for luxuries like that.
The Delts tipped the lander over and dragged it about
twenty feet. Their cycles wiped out most of the footprints.
They were going to steal the flag and take it back to their
dorm, but one of them fell off his mount, cracked his
faceplate, and went to that great pledge party in the sky.
Psuits were not as safe then as they are now. Horseplay in a
p-suit was not a good idea.
But not to worry. Tranquility Base was one of the most
documented places in the history of history. Tens of thousands
of photos existed, including very detailed shots from orbit.
Teams of selenolography students spent a year restoring the
Base. Each square meter was scrutinized, debates raged about
the order in which footprints had been laid down, then two guys
went out there and tromped around with replica Apollo
moonboots, each step measured by laser, and were hauled out on
a winch when they were through. Presto! An historical
re-creation passing as the real thing. This is not a secret,
but very few people know about it. Look it up.
I felt a hand flip the radio switch on my suit back on.
"Fancy meeting you here," Liz said.
"Quite a coincidence," I said, thinking about the CC
listening in. She joined me, leaning on the railing and looking
out over the plain. Behind the far wall of the round visitors'
gallery I could see thousands of people looking toward us
through the glass.
"I come here a lot," she said. "Would you travel a
half-million miles in a tinfoil toy like that?"
"I wouldn't go half a meter in it. I'd rather travel by
pogo stick."
"They were real men in those days. Have you ever thought
about it? What it must have been like? They could barely turn
around in that thing. One of them made it back with half the
ship blown up."
"Yeah. I have thought about it. Maybe not as much as you."
"Think about this, then. You know who the real hero was?
In my opinion? Good old Mike Collins, the poor sap who stayed
in orbit. Whoever designed this operation didn't think it out.
Say something went wrong, say the lander crashes and these two
die instantly. There's Collins up in orbit, all by himself. How
are you gonna deal with that? No ticker-tape parade for Mike.
He gets to attend the memorial service, and spend the rest of
his life wishing he'd died with them. He gets to be a national
goat, is what he gets."
"I hadn't thought of that."
"So things go right--and they did, though I'll never
understand how--so who does the Planetary Park get named after?
Why, the guy who flubbed his 'first words' from the surface."
"I thought that was a garbled transmission."
"Don't you believe it. 'Course, if I'd had two billion
people listening in, I might have fucked it up, too. That part
was probably scarier than the thought of dying, anyway, having
everybody watching you die, and hoping that if it did go
rotten, it wouldn't be your fault. This little exercise cost
twenty, thirty billion dollars, and that was back when a
billion was real money."
It was still real money to me, but I let her ramble on.
This was her show; she'd brought me here, knowing only that I
was interested in telling her something in a place where the CC
couldn't overhear. I was in her hands.
"Let's go for a walk," she said, and started off. I
hurried to catch up with her, followed her down several flights
of stairs to the surface.
You can cover a lot of ground on the surface in a fairly
short time. The best gait is a hop from the ball of the foot,
swinging each leg out slightly to the side. There's no point in
jumping too high, it just wastes energy.
I know there are still places on Luna where the virgin
dust stretches as far as the eye can see. Not many, but a few.
The mineral wealth of my home planet is not great, and all the
interesting places have been identified and mapped from orbit,
so there's little incentive to visit some of the more remote
regions. By remote, I mean far from the centers of human
habitation; any spot on Luna is easily reachable by a lander or
crawler.
Everywhere I'd ever been on the surface looked much like
the land around Tranquility Base, covered with so many tracks
you wondered where the big crowd had gone, since there was
likely to be not a single soul in sight but whatever companions
you were traveling with. Nothing ever goes away on Luna. It has
been continuously inhabited by humans for almost two and a half
centuries. Every time someone has taken a stroll or dropped an
empty oxygen tank the evidence is still there, so a place that
got two visitors every three or four years looks like hundreds
of people have gone by just a few minutes before. Tranquility
got considerably more than that. There was not a square
millimeter of undisturbed dust, and the litter was so thick it
had been kicked into heaps here and there. I saw empty beer
cans with labels a hundred and fifty years old lying next to
some they were currently selling in Armstrong Park.
After a bit some of that thinned out. The tracks tended to
group themselves into impromptu trails. I guess humans tend to
follow the herd, even when the herd is gone and the land is so
flat it doesn't matter where you go.
"You left too early last night," Liz said, the radio
making it sound as if she was standing beside me when I could
see her twenty meters in front. "There was some excitement."
"I thought it was pretty exciting while I was there."
"Then you must have seen the Duke of Bosnia tangling with
the punchbowl."
"No, I missed that. But I tangled with him earlier."
"That was you? Then it's your fault. He was in a foul
mood. Apparently you didn't mark him enough; he figures if he
hasn't lost a kilo or two of flesh after pounding the sheets,
somebody just wasn't trying."
"He didn't complain."
"He wouldn't. I swear, I think I'm related to him, but
that man is so stupid, he hasn't got the brains God gave a
left-handed screwdriver. After you went home he got drunk as a
waltzing pissant and decided somebody had put poison in the
punch, so he tipped it over and picked it up and started
banging people over the head with it. I had to come over and
coldcock him."
"You do give interesting parties."
"Ain't it the truth? But that's not what I was gonna tell
you about. We were having so much fun we completely forgot
about the gifts, so I gathered everybody around and started
opening them."
"You get anything nice?"
"Well, a few had the sense to tape the receipt to the box.
I'll clear a little money on that. So I got to one that said it
was from the Earl of Donegal, which should have tipped me off,
but what do I know about the goddam United Kingdom? I thought
it was a province of Wales, or something. I knew I didn't know
the guy, but who can keep track? I opened it, and it was from
the Irish Republican Pranksters."
"Oh, no."
"The hereditary enemies of my clan. Next thing I know
we're all covered with this green stuff, I don't wanna know
where it came from, but I know what it smelled like. And that
was the end of that party. Just as well. I had to mail half the
guests home, anyway."
"I hate those jerks. On St. Patrick's day you don't dare
sit down without looking for a green whoopee cushion."
"You think you got it bad? Every mick in King City comes
gunning for me on the seventeenth of March, so they can tell
their buddies how they put one over on the bleedin' Princess o'
Wales. And it's only gonna get worse now."
"Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown."
"I'll crown 'em, all right. I know where Paddy Flynn
lives, and I'm gonna get even if it harelips the Mayor and the