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glasses; I didn't remember drinking them, and I didn't feel
drunk.
As the food reached my belly, as brain cells resumed
working in isolated clumps throughout my head, I began to
notice other things, such as that the floor was shaking. Not
bouncing up and down, just a steady, slightly scary vibration
that I finally identified as crowd noise. Andrew's locker room
was almost directly beneath the center of the Bucket of Blood.
We had come down some ringside stairs to reach it. I looked for
a clock, in vain.
"How long have we been talking?" I asked, around a
mouthful of cold cuts and bread.
"The main event is still almost half an hour away."
"That's you, isn't it?"
"Yes."
It didn't bear thinking about. I'd arrived in the early
afternoon, and there had been nine bouts listed on the fight
card before Andrew's death match. It had to be ten, eleven
o'clock.
"There's no clocks in here," I said, hoping he'd take it
as an apology.
"I won't allow them, before a fight. They distract me."
"Make you nervous?" Maybe it was a needling question. How
dare he not get nervous before a fight? His unearthly calm was
a little hard to take.
"They distract me."
I was noticing other things. It seems ridiculous to say
I'd spent so much time in such a small room and not seen it,
but I hadn't. Not that there was a lot to see. The place was as
impersonal as a hotel room, which I guess it was, in a way.
What I saw now were four telephone screens on the wall beside
him, each displaying a worried-looking face, each with the
sound turned off and the words URGENT! PICK UP! flashing
beneath the faces. I recognized two of them as people I'd seen
around Andrew the last time I'd been here. Trainers, managers,
that sort of thing.
"Looks like you'd better take care of some business," I
said. He waved it away. "Shouldn't you be, I don't know,
talking strategy with those people? Getting pep talks,
something like that?"
"I'll be glad to miss the pep talks, frankly," he said.
"It's the worst part of this ordeal." I had to admit the four
people on the phone looked more nervous than he did.
"I still better get out of your way," I said, getting up,
trying to swallow a mouthful of food. "You'd better do what you
need to do to get ready."
"With me, it was ten years," he said.
I sat back down.
I could pretend I didn't know what he was talking about,
but it would be a lie. I knew exactly what he was talking
about, and he promptly proved me right by saying:
"Ten years of false memories. That was six years ago, and
I've spent all that time looking for someone to tell about it."
"That, and trying to get yourself killed," I said.
"I know it looks that way to you. I don't see it that
way."
"But you did try to kill yourself."
"Yes, six years ago. I found there was absolutely nothing
I had the least interest in doing. I am well over two hundred
years old, and it seemed to me it had been at least a century
since I'd done anything new."
"You were bored."
"It went a lot deeper than that. Depressed, uninterested .
. . once I spent three days simply sitting in the bathtub. I
saw no reason to get out. I decided to end my life, and it
wasn't an easy decision for me. I was raised to believe that
life is a precious gift, that there is always something useful
you can do with it. But I could no longer find anything
meaningful."
He was a lot better at telling it than I had been. He'd
had longer to practice it, in his own mind, at least. He just
hit all the high points, saying several times that he'd fill me
in on the details when he got back from the fight. Briefly, he
had been marooned on an island that sounded very much like
Scarpa, only tougher. He'd had to work very hard. He suffered
many setbacks, and never achieved anything like the comforts
granted to me. It was only in the last two years of his
ten-year stay that things eased up a bit.
"It sounds like the CC put you through the same basic
program," he said. "From what you describe, it's been improved
some; new technology, new subroutines. I accepted it at the
time, of course--I didn't have any choice, since they weren't
my memories--but reviewing it afterwards the realism factor
does not seem so high as what you experienced."
"The CC said he'd gotten better at that."
"He's forever improving."
"It must have been hell."
"I loved every second of it." He let that hang for a
moment, then leaned forward slightly, his already-intense eyes
blazing. "When life is simple like that, you have no chance to
be bored. When your life hangs in the balance as a consequence
of every action you take, suicide seems such an effete,
ridiculous thing. Every organism has the survival instinct at
its very core. That so many humans kill themselves--not just
now, they have been doing it for a long time-says a lot about
civilization, about 'intelligence.' Suicides have lost an
ability that every amoeba possesses: the knowledge of how to
live."
"So that's the secret of life?" I asked. "Hardship?
Earning what you get out of life, working for it?"
"I don't know." He got up and began pacing. "I was
exhilarated when I returned to the here and now. I thought I
had an answer. Then I realized, as you did, that I couldn't
trust it. It wasn't me living those ten years. It was a machine
writing a script about how he thought I would have lived them.
He got some of it right, but a lot more wrong, because . . . it
wasn't me. The me he was trying to imitate had just tried to
end his life. The me the CC imagined worked like a dog to stay
alive. It was the CC's wish-fulfillment, not mine."
"But you said--"
"But it was an answer," he said, whirling to face me.
"What I found out was that, for well over a century, I'd had
nothing at risk! Whether I succeeded or failed at something had
no meaning for me, because my life was not at stake. Not even
my comfort was really at stake. If I succeeded or failed
financially, for instance. If I succeeded, I'd simply win more
things that had long ago lost their meaning. If I failed, I
would lose some of these things, but the State would take care
of my basic needs."
I wanted to say something, to argue with him, but he was
on a roll, and it was just as well, because even if I did
disagree with him here and there, it was exciting simply to be
able to talk about it with someone who knew.
"That's when I started fighting death matches," he said.
"I had to re-introduce an element of risk into my life." He
held up a hand. "Not too much risk; I'm very good at what I
do." And now he smiled, and it was beautiful. "And I do want to
live again. That's what you've got to do, Hildy. You've got to
find a way to experience risk again. It's a tonic like nothing
I ever imagined."
The questions were lining up in my mind, clamoring to get
out. There was one more important than all the others.
"What's to prevent the CC," I said, slowly, "from reviving
you again, like he did to me, if you . . . make a mistake?"
"I will, someday. Everybody does. I think it will be a
long time yet."
"There's lots of people gunning for you."
"I'm going to retire soon. A few more matches, that's
all."
"What about the tonic?"
He smiled again. "I think I've had enough of it. I needed
it, I needed to have the death matches . . . and nothing else
would have worked. That's the beauty of it. To die so publicly
. . ."
I saw it then. The CC wouldn't dare revive Silvio, for
instance (not that he could; Silvio's brain had been
destroyed). Everybody knew Silvio was dead, and if he suddenly
showed up again embarrassing questions would be asked.
Committees would be formed, petitions circulated, programming
re-examined. Andrew had found the obvious way to beat the CC's
little resurrection game, an answer so obvious that I had never
thought of it.
Or had I, and simply kept it buried?
That would have to be a question for later as, with an
apologetic shrug, Andrew opened his door and half of King City
spilled into the room, all talking at once. Well, fifteen or
twenty people, anyway, most of them angry. I collected a few
glares and tried to make myself small in one corner of the room
and watch as agents, trainers, managers, Arena reps, and media
types all tried to compress an hour's worth of psyching up,
legalities, and interviews into the five minutes left to them
before the match was due to start. Andrew remained an island of
calm in the center of this hurricane, which rivaled any press
conference I've ever attended for sheer confusion.
Then he was gone, trailing them all behind him like
yapping puppies. The noise faded down the short corridor and up
the stairs and I heard the crowd noise grow louder and the bass
mumble that was all I could hear of the announcer's voice from
this deep below the ring.
The noise stayed at that level for a while, then decreased
a little, as I sat down to wait for his return.
Then it grew to a pitch I thought might endanger the
building. Fans, I thought, contemptuously.
If anything, it grew even louder, and I began to wonder
what was going on.
And then they brought Andrew MacDonald back on a
stretcher.
#
Nothing is ever as straightforward as it at first seems.
Andrew was fighting a death match . . . but what did that mean?
I had no idea, myself. Having seen just a few matches, I
knew that blows were delivered routinely that would not have
been survivable without modern medical techniques. I had
witnessed medical attention being administered between rounds,
combatants being patched up, body fluids being replaced. The
normal sign of victory was the removal of the loser's head, one
of the many endearing things about slash-boxing and surely a
sign that things weren't going well for the beheadee . . . but
what about the Grand Flack? He did quite well without a body.
The only surely fatal wound these days was the destruction of
the brain, and the CC was working on that one.
It seemed the rules were different for a death match. It
also seemed no one was really happy about them, except possibly
for Andrew.
I could not tell what his injuries were, but his head was
still on his shoulders. The body was covered with a sheet,
which was soaked in blood. I gathered, later, that a hierarchy
of wounds had been established for death matches, that some
could be treated by ringside handlers between rounds, and that
others had to be acknowledged as fatal. The fallen opponent was
not decapitated, it being thought too gruesome to hold aloft an
actual dead severed head. I was told the ritual took the place
of the coup de grace, that it was meant to be symbolic of
victory in some way. Go figure that one out.
I also learned, later, that no one really knew how to
handle the situation they now found themselves in. Only three
fighters had ever engaged in death matches since they were
allowed into a gray area of legality known as consensual
suicide. Only one had ever met the requirements for a death
wound, and he had experienced a deathbed revelation that could
be summed up as "maybe this wasn't such a good idea, after
all," been revived, stitched up, and retired in disgrace to
everyone's considerable secret relief. Of the two people
currently risking their lives in fights, it had been tacitly
agreed long ago that they would never meet each other, as the
certain outcome of such a match would be the pickle the
handlers, lawyers, and Arena management now found themselves
in, which might be expressed as "are we really going to let
this silly son of a bitch die on us?"
There was not a lot of time to come up with an answer. I
could hear a sound coming from Andrew, all the way across the
room, and knew I was hearing the death rattle.
I couldn't see much of him. If he'd hoped his final
moments would be peaceful, he'd been a fool. A dozen people
crowded around, some feverish to offer aid, others worrying
about corporate liability, a very few standing up for Andrew's
right to die as he pleased.
The Bucket of Blood management had for years been in a
quandary concerning death matches. On the one hand, they were a
guaranteed draw; stadia were always filled when the titillation
of a possible actual death was offered. On the other, no one
knew what the public reaction would be if someone actually died
right out there in front of God and everyone, for the glory of
sport. The prevailing opinion was it would not be good for
business. The public's appetite for non-injurious violence in
sport and entertainment had never been plumbed, but real death,
though always good for a sensation, was much easier to take if
it could be seen as an accident, like David Earth, or Nirvana.
To give them credit, the Arena people were queasy about
the whole idea, and not just from a legal standpoint. Their
worst sin in the matter was something we all do, which is fail
to imagine the worst happening. No one had died in a death
match yet, and they'd kept hoping no one would. Now someone
was.
But not without a last-ditch effort. The people around him
reminded me, as things in life so often do, of scenes from
movies. You've seen them: in a war picture, when medics gather
around a wounded comrade trying to save his life, buddies at
his side telling him everything's gonna be okay, kid, you've
got a million-dollar wound there, you'll be home with the babes
before you know it, and their eyes saying this one's a goner.
And this seems weird, maybe it was a trick of the light, but I
saw another scene, the priest leaning over the bed, holding a
rosary, hearing the last confession, giving the last rites.
What they were really doing was trying to talk him into
accepting treatment, please, so we can all go home and wipe our
brows and have a few stiff drinks and pretend this fucking
disaster never happened, dear lord.
He refused them all. Gradually their pleas grew less
impassioned, and a few even gave up and retreated to the wall
near me, like what he had was contagious. And finally someone
leaned close enough to hear what it was he'd been trying to
say, and that someone looked over at me and beckoned.
I'm surprised I made it, as I had no feeling in my legs.
But somehow I was leaning over him, into the stench of his
blood, his entrails, the smell of death on him now, and he
grabbed my hand with an amazing strength and tried to lift
himself closer to my ear because he didn't have much of a voice
left. I hope he wasn't feeling any pain; they said he wasn't,
pain wasn't his thing, he'd been deadened before the match. He
coughed.
"Let them help you, Andrew," I said. "You've proved your
point."
"No point," he coughed. "Nothing to prove, to them."
"You're sure? It's no disgrace. I'll still respect you."
"Not about respect. Gotta go through with it, or it didn't
mean anything."
"That's crazy. You could have died in any of them. You
don't have to die now to validate that."
He shook his head, and coughed horribly. He went limp, and
I thought he was dead, but then his hand put a little pressure
on mine again, and I leaned closer to his lips.
"Tricked," he said, and died.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
It's a well-known fact that nobody goes to the library in
this day and age. It's also wrong.
Why take the time and trouble to travel to a big building
where actual books on actual paper are stored when you can stay
at home and access any of that information, plus trillions of
pages of data that exist only in the memories? If you don't
already know the answer to that question, then you just don't
love books, and I'll never be able to explain it to you. But if
you get up from your terminal right now, any time of the day or
night, take the tube down to the King City Civic Center Plaza,
and walk up the Italian marble steps between the statues of
Knowledge and Wisdom, you will find the Great Hall of Books
thrumming with the kind of quiet activity that has
characterized great libraries since books were on papyrus
scrolls. Do it someday. Stroll past the rows of scholars at the
old oak tables, stand in the center of the dome, beside the
Austin Gutenberg Bible in its glass case, look down the
infinite rows of shelves radiating away from you. If you love
books at all, it will soothe your mind.
Soothing was something my mind was sorely in need of. In
the three or four days following the death of Andrew MacDonald,
I spent a lot of time at the library. There was no practical
reason for it; though I was now homeless, I could have done the
reading and research I now engaged in sitting in the park, or
in my hotel room. Few of the things I looked at actually
existed on paper anyway. I spent my time looking at a library
terminal no different from the ones in any streetcorner phone
box. But I was far from the only one so engaged. Though many
people used the library because they liked holding the actual
source material in their hands, most were accessing stored
data, and simply preferred to do it with real books on shelves
around them. Let's face it, the vast majority of books in the
King City Library were quite old, the pre-Invasion legacy of a
few bibliophile fanatics who insisted the yellowing, fragile,
inefficient and inconvenient old things were necessary to any
culture that called itself civilized, who convinced the
software types that the logically unjustifiable expense of
shipping them up here was, in the end, worth it. As for new
books . . . why bother? I doubt more than six or seven new
works were published on paper in a typical Lunar year. There
was a small publishing business, never very profitable, because
some people liked to have sets of the classics sitting on a
shelf in the living room. Books had become almost entirely the
province of interior decorators.
But not here. These books were used. Many had to be stored
in special inert-gas rooms and you had to don a p-suit to
handle them, under the watchful eyes of librarians who thought
dog-earing should be a hanging offense, but every volume in the
institution was available for reference, right up to the
Gutenberg. Almost a million books sat on open shelves. You
could walk down the rows and run your hand over them, pull one
down and open it (carefully, carefully!), smell the old paper
and glue and dust. I did most of my work with a copy of Tom
Sawyer open on the table beside me, partly so I could read a
chapter when I got tired of the research, partly so I could
just touch it when I felt at my lowest.
I'd had to keep redefining "lowest." I was beginning to
wonder if there was a natural lower limit, if this was the
limit I had reached the last times, when I had attempted to
kill myself, would have killed myself without the CC's
intervention.
My research concerned, naturally enough, suicide. It
didn't take me long to discover that not much useful was really
known about it. Why should that have surprised me? Not much
really useful was known concerning anything relating to why we
are what we are and do what we do.
There's plenty of behavioristic data: stimulus A evokes
response B. There's lots of statistical data as well: X percent
will react in such-andsuch a way to event Y. It all worked very
well with insects, frogs, fish and such, tolerably good with
dogs and cats and mice, even reasonably decent with human
beings. But then you pose a question like why, when Aunt
Betty's boy Wilbur got run over by the paving machine, did she
up and stick her head in the microwave, while her sister Gloria
who'd suffered a similar loss grieved, mourned, recovered, and
went on to lead a long and useful life? Best extremely
scientific answer to date: It beats the shit out of me.
Another reason for being in the library was that it was
the perfect place to go at a problem in a logical way. The
whole environment seemed to encourage it. And that's what I
intended to do. Andrew's death had really rocked me. I had
nothing else that needed doing, so I was going to attack my
problem by going at it a step at a time, which meant that first
I had to define the steps. Step one, it seemed to me, was to
learn all I could about the causes of suicide. After three days
of almost constant reading and note-taking I had it down to
four, maybe five categories of suicide. (I bought a pad of
paper and pencil to take notes with, which earned me a few
sidelong glances from my neighbors. Even in these fusty
environs writing on paper was seen as eccentric.) These four,
maybe five categories were not hardedged, they overlapped each
other with big, fuzzy gray borders. Again, no surprise.
The first and easiest to identify was cultural. Most
societies condemned suicide in most circumstances, but some did
not. Japan was an outstanding example. In ancient Japan suicide
was not only condoned, but mandatory in some circumstances.
Further, it was actually institutionalized, so that one who had
lost honor must not only kill himself, but do it in a
prescribed, public, and very painful way. Many other cultures
looked on suicide, in certain circumstances, as an honorable
thing to do.
Even in societies where suicide was frowned on or viewed
as a mortal sin, there were circumstances where it was at least
understandable. I encountered many tales both in folklore and
reality of frustrated lovers leaping off a cliff hand in hand.
There were also the cases of elderly people in intractable pain
(see Reason #2), and several other marginally acceptable
reasons.
Most early cultures were very tough to analyze.
Demographics, as we know it, didn't really get its start until
recently. Records were kept of births and deaths and not much
else. How do you determine what the suicide rate was in ancient
Babylon? You don't. You can't even learn much useful about
Nineteenth Century Europe. There were blips in the data here
and there. In the Twentieth Century it was said that Swedes
killed themselves at a rate higher than their contemporaries.
Some blamed the cold weather, the long winters, but how then do
you account for the Finns, the Norwegians, the Siberians?
Others said it was the dour nature of the Swedes themselves.
I've been asking people questions for long enough to know
something important about them: they lie. They lie often enough
even when nothing is at stake. When the answer can mean
something as important as whether or not Grandpa Jacques gets
buried in the hallowed ground of the churchyard, suicide notes
have a way of vanishing, bodies get re-arranged, coroners and
law officers get bribed or simply look the other way out of
respect for the family. The blip in suicide data for the Swedes
could simply have meant they were more straightforward about
reporting it.
As for Lunar society, post-Invasion society in general . .
. it was a civil right, but it was widely viewed as the
coward's way out. Suicide was not something that was going to
earn you any points with the neighbors.
The second reason was best summed up in the statement "I
can't go on like this anymore." The most obvious of these cases
involved pain, and no longer applied. Then there was
unhappiness. What can you say about unhappiness? It is real,
and can have real and easily seen causes: disappointment with
one's accomplishments in life, frustration at being unable to
attain a goal or an object, tragedy, loss. Other times, the
cause of this hopeless feeling can be difficult to see to the
outside observer: "He had everything to live for."
Then there was the reason Andrew proclaimed, that he had
been bored. This happened even in the days when people didn't
live to be two, three hundred years old, but rarely. It was a
reason appearing in more and more suicide notes as life spans
lengthened.
The fourth reason might be called the inability to
visualize death. Children were vulnerable to this one; many
affluent, industrial societies reported increasing teen-age
suicide rates, and survivors of failed attempts often revealed
elaborate fantasies of being aware at their own funerals, of
getting back at their tormenters: "I'll show them, they'll miss
me when I'm gone."
That's why I said I had maybe five reasons. I couldn't
decide if the attempts, successful or not, known as "gestures"
rated a category of their own. Authorities differed as to how
many suicides were merely cries for help. In a sense, all of
them were, if only to an indifferent Providence. Help me stop
the pain, help me find love, help me find a reason, help me,
I'm hurting . . .
Did I say maybe five? Maybe six.
Maybe six was what I thought of as "The Seasons Of Life."
We are, most of us, closet numerologists, subconscious
astrologers. We are fascinated with anniversaries, birthdays,
ages of ourselves and others. You are in your thirties, or
forties, or seventies, or you're over one hundred. Back when
people lived their fourscore years, on average, those words
said even more than they do today. Turning forty meant your
life was half over, and was a portentous time to examine what
the first half had been like and, often as not, find it
lacking. Turning ninety meant you'd already outlived your
allotted time, and the most useful thing left to you was
selecting the color of your coffin.
Ages with a zero on the end were a particularly stressful
time. They still are. One term I encountered was "mid-life
crisis," used back when mid-life was somewhere between 40 and
50. Ages with two zeros on the end pack one hell of a wallop.
Newspapers used to run stories about centenarians. The data I
studied said that, even though it might now be thought of as
mid-life, the age of one zero zero still meant a lot. While you
could be in your eighties, or your nineties, you were never in
your hundreds. That term just never attained popular usage. You
were "over one hundred," or "over two hundred." Soon there
would be people over three hundred years old. And there was a
rise in the suicide rate at both these magical milestones.
Which was of particular interest to me because . . . now
how old did Hildy say she was, class? Let's not always see the
same hands.
#
I don't know if my research was really telling me much,
but it was something to do, and I intended to keep on doing it.
I became a library gnome, going out only to sleep and eat. But
after four days something told me it was time to take a walk,
and my feet drew me back to Texas.
I was wondering what could happen to me next. Death had
dogged my steps from the time of my return from Scarpa Island:
David Earth, Silvio, Andrew, eleven hundred and twenty-six
souls in Nirvana. Three brontosaurs. Was I forgetting anybody?
Was anything good ever going to happen to me?
I sneaked in a back way I had found during my hiding-out
days. I didn't want to encounter any of my friends from New
Austin, I didn't want to have to try to explain to them why I'd
torched my own cabin. If I couldn't explain it to myself, what
was I going to say to them? So I came over the hill from a
different direction and my first thought was I must be lost,
because there was a cabin over there. Then I thought, maybe for
the first time since this ordeal began, that I might be losing
my mind, because I wasn't lost, I was where I thought I was,
and that was my cabin, intact, just as it had been before I
watched it consumed by flames.
You can get a genuine dizzy feeling at a time like that; I
sat down. After a moment I noticed two things that might be of
interest. First, the cabin was not quite where it had been. It
looked to have been moved about three meters up the slope of
the hill. Second, there was a pile of what looked like charred
lumber down in the slight depression I'd been calling "the
gully." As I watched, a third item of interest appeared: a
heavily-loaded burro came around the side of the house, looked
at me briefly, and then stuck his nose into a bucket of water
that had been left in the shade.
I got up and started toward the cabin as a man came out
the front door and began lifting the burdens from the beast and
setting them on the ground. He must have heard me, because he
looked up, grinned toothlessly, and waved at me. I knew him.
"Sourdough," I called out to him. "What the hell are you
doing?"
"Evening, Hildy," he said. "Hope you don't mind. I just
got into town and they sent me up here, said to stick around a
few days and let them know when you got back."
"You're always welcome, Sourdough, you know that. Mi casa
es tu casa. It's just . . ." I paused, looked over the cabin
again, and wiped sweat from my forehead. "I didn't think I had
a casa."
He scratched himself, and spat in the dust.
"Well, I don't know much about that. All I know's Mayor
Dillon said if'n I didn't give a holler when you got back to
these here parts, he'd skin me and Matilda." He patted the
burro affectionately, raising a cloud of dust.
Maybe old Sourdough laid on the accent and the Old West
slang a bit thick, but I felt he was entitled. He was a real
Natural, as opposed to Walter, who was only natural on the
surface.
He belonged to a religious sect that had some things in
common with the Christian Scientists. They didn't refuse all
medical help, nor did they pray for a cure when they were sick.
What they rejected was rejuvenation. They allowed themselves to
grow old and, when the measures needed to keep them alive
reached a point Sourdough had described to me as "just too dang
much trouble," they died.
There was even some money in it. The Antiquities Board
paid them a small annual stipend for having the grace to let
them avoid what would have been a tricky ethical problem, which
was maintaining a small control group of humans untouched by
most modern medical advances.
Sourdough was one of the handful of prospectors who roamed
West Texas. His chances of discovering a vein of gold or silver
were slim--zero, actually, since nothing like that had been
included in the specs when the place was built. But the
management assured us there were three pockets of
diamond-bearing minerals somewhere in Texas. No one had found
any of them yet. Sourdough and three or four others ranged over
the land with their pickaxes and grubstakes and burros, perhaps
secretly hoping they'd never find them. After all, what would
you do with a handful of diamonds? It certainly didn't justify
all that work.
I'd asked Sourdough about that, early on, before I'd
learned it was impolite to ask such questions in an historical
disney.
"I'll tell you, Hildy," he'd said, not taking offense. "I
worked forty years at a job I didn't particularly like. I'm not
quite the fool I sound; I didn't realize how much I disliked it
until I quit. But when I retired I come out here and I liked
the sunshine and the heat and the open air. I found I'd pretty
much lost my taste for the company of people. I can only take
'em in small doses now. And I've been happy. Matilda is the
only company I need, and prospecting gives me something to do."
In fact, Matilda seemed to be his only remaining worry in
life. He was concerned about her welfare after he was gone. He
was constantly asking people if they'd see to her needs, to the
point that half the people in New Austin had promised to adopt
the damn donkey.
He looked older than Adam's granddaddy. All his teeth were
gone, and most of his hair. His skin was mottled and wrinkled
and loose on his scrawny frame and his knuckles were swollen to
the size of walnuts.
He was eighty-three years old, seventeen years younger
than me.
I'd had him pegged as an illit, and the job he'd hated as
something on the order of the carrying of hods, whatever they
were, or the laying of bricks. Then Dora told me he'd been the
Chairman of the Board of the third largest company on Mars.
He'd retired to Luna for the gravity.
"What happened here, Sourdough?" I asked. "I didn't sell
the land. What gives somebody the right to come in here and
build on it?"
"I don't know about that, either, Hildy. You know me. I've
been out in the hills, and let me tell you, girl, I'm on the
trail of something."
He went on like that for a while, with me paying minimal
attention. Sourdough and his like were always on the trail of
something. I looked around the house. There wasn't much
different between this one and the one I'd built and burned
down, except some almost indefinable things that told me the
builders had been better at it than I had been. The dimensions
were the same, the windows were in the same places. But it
looked more solid. I went inside, Sourdough trailing behind me
still yammering about the glory hole he was on the verge of
discovering. The inside was still bare except for some bright
yellow calico curtains in the windows. They were prettier than
the ones I'd installed.
I went back out, still unable to make sense of it, and
looked down the road toward New Austin in time to see the first
of a long parade arrive from town.
The next half hour is something of a blur.
More than a dozen wagons arrived in the hour of dusk. All
of them were laden with people and food and drink and other
things. The people got down and set to work, building a fire,
stringing orange paper lanterns with candles inside, clearing
an area for dancing. Someone had loaded the piano from the
saloon, and stood beside it turning the crank. There was a
banjo player and a fiddle player, both dreadful, but no one
seemed to mind. Before I quite knew what was happening there
was a full-scale hoedown going on. A cow was turning on the
spit, sizzling in barbecue sauce that hissed and popped when it
dripped into the fire. A table had been laid out with cookies
and cakes and candied fruits in mason jars. Bottles of beer
were thrust into a galvanized tub full of ice and people were
swilling it down or sipping from bottles they'd tucked away.
Petticoats and silk stockings flashed in the firelight as the
ladies from the Alamo kicked up their heels and the men stood
around whooping and hollering and clapping their hands or moved
in and tried to turn it into a square dance. All my friends
from New Austin had showed up, and a lot more I didn't even
know, and I still didn't know why.
Before things got out of hand Mayor Dillon stood up on a
table and fired his pistol three times in the air. Things got
quiet soon enough, and the Mayor swayed and would have toppled
but for the ladies on each side of him, propping him up. Next
to the Doctor, Mayor Dillon was the town's most notorious
drunk.
"Hildy," he intoned, in a voice any politician for the
last thousand years would have recognized, "when the good
citizens of New Austin heard of your recent misfortune we knew
we couldn't just let it lie. Am I right, folks?"
He was greeted with a huge cheer and a great guzzling of
beer.
"We know how it is with city folks. Insurance, filin'
claims, forms to fill out, shit like that." He belched hugely
and went on. "Well, we ain't like that. A neighbor needs a
hand, and the people of West Texas are there to help out."
"Mister Mayor," I started, tentatively, "there's been a--"
"Shut up, Hildy," he said, and belched again. "No, we
ain't like that, are we, friends?"
"NO!!" shouted the citizens of New Austin.
"No, we ain't. When misfortune befalls one of us, it
befalls us all. Maybe I shouldn't say it, Hildy, but when you
showed up here, some of us figured you for a weekender." He
thumped himself on the chest and leaned forward, almost
toppling once more, his eyes bulging as if daring me to
disbelieve the incredible statement he was about to make. "I
figured you for a weekender, Hildy, me, Mayor Matthew Thomas
Dillon, mayor of this great town nigh these seven years." He
hung his head theatrically. Then his head popped up, as if on a
spring. "But we were wrong. In this last little while, you've
showed yourself a true Texan. You built yourself a cabin. You
came into town and sat down with us, drank with us, ate with
us, gambled with us."
"Gambled, hah!" Sourdough mumbled. "That weren't
gamblin'." He got a lot of laughs.
"Mayor Dillon," I pleaded, "please let me say-"
"Not until I've said my piece," he roared, amiably. "Then,
four days ago, disaster struck. And let me say there's those of
us who aren't completely cut off from the outside world, Hildy,
there's those of us who keep up. We knew you'd just lost your
job on the outside, and we figured you were trying to make a
new start here in God's Country. Now, back outside, where you
come from, folks would have just tsk-tsked about it and said
what a shame. Not Texans. So here it is, Hildy," and he swept
his arm in a huge circle meant to indicate the spanking new
cabin, and this time he did fall from the table, taking his
bargirl escort with him. But he popped up like a cork, dignity
intact. "That there's your new house, and this here's your
housewarming party."
Which I'd figured out shortly after he'd mounted the
table. And oh, dear god, did ever woman feel such mixed
emotions.
#
How I got through that night I'll never know.
Following the speech came the giving of gifts. I got
everything from the ritual bread and salt from my ex-wife,
Dora, to a spanking new cast-iron cook stove from the owner of
the general store. I accepted a rocking chair and a pair of
pigs, who promptly got loose and led everyone a merry chase.
There was a new bed and two hand-sewn quilts to put on it. I
was gifted with apple pies and fireplace tools, a roll of
chicken wire and a china tea set, bars of soap rendered from
lard, a sack of nails, five chickens, an iron skillet . . . the
list went on and on. Rich or poor, everyone for miles around
gave me something. When a little girl came up and gave me a tea
cozy she'd crocheted herself I finally broke down and cried. It
was a relief in a way; I'd been smiling so hard and so long I
thought my face would crack. It went over well. Everyone patted
me on the back and there was not a dry eye in the house.
Then the night's festivities began in earnest. The beef
was sliced and the beans dished out, plates were heaped high,
and people sat around gorging themselves. I drank everything
that was handed to me, but I never felt like I got drunk. I
must have been, to some degree, because the rest of the evening
exists for me as a series of unconnected scenes.
One I remember was me, the Mayor, and Sourdough sitting on
a log before the fire with a square dance happening behind us.
We must have been talking, but I have no idea what we'd been
talking about. Memory returns as the Mayor says:
"Hildy, some of us were sitting around talking over to the
Alamo Saloon the other day."
"You tell her, Mayor Dillon," a girl shouted behind us,
then whirled away into the dance again.
"Harrumph," said the Mayor. "I need to drop in at the
saloon from time to time to keep up on the needs of my
constituents, you see."
"Sure, Mayor Dillon," I said, knowing he spent an average
of six hours each day at his usual table, and if what he'd been
doing was feeling the pulse of the public then the voters of
New Austin were the most thoroughly kept-up-on since the
invention of democracy. Perhaps that accounted for the huge
majorities he regularly achieved. Or maybe it was the fact that
he ran unopposed.
"The consensus is, Hildy," he intoned, "that you'll never
make a farmer."
That should have come as news to no one. Aside from the
fact that I doubted I had any talent for it and had not, in
fact, had any plans to farm in the first place, nobody had ever
run a successful farm in the Great Big Bubble known as West
Texas. To farm, you need water, lots and lots of it. You could
raise a vegetable garden, run cattle--though goats were
better--and hogs seemed to thrive, but farming was right out.
"I think you're right," I said, and drank from the mason
jar in my hand. As I did, the Parson sat next to me, and drank
from his mason jar.
"We don't really know if you plan to stay here," the Mayor
went on. "We don't mean to pressure you either way; maybe you
have plans for another job on the outside." He raised his
eyebrows, then his mason jar.
"Not particularly."
"Well then." He seemed about to go on, then looked
puzzled. I'd been that drunk before, and knew the feeling. He
hadn't a clue as to what he'd been about to say.
"What the Mayor is trying to say," the Parson chimed in,
tactfully, "is that a life of salooncrawling and gambling may
not be the best for you."
"Gambling, hah!" Sourdough put in. "That lady don't
gamble."
"Shut up, Sourdough," the Mayor said.
"Well, she don't!" he said, defiantly. "Not three weeks
ago, when she turned up that fourth ace with the biggest pot of
the night, I knowed she was cheating!"
These would have been fighting words from almost anybody
but Sourdough. Had they been uttered in the Alamo they'd have
been reason enough to overturn the table and start shooting at
each other--to the delight of the manufacturers of blank
cartridges and the amusement of the tourists at the adjoining
tables. From Sourdough, I decided to let it pass, especially
since it was true. The big pot he mentioned, by the way, was
about thirty-five cents.
"Calm down," said the Parson. "If you think someone is
cheating, you should say so right then and there."
"Couldn't!" Sourdough said. "Didn't know how she done it."
"Then she probably didn't."
"She sure as hell did. I know what I dealt her!" he said,
triumphantly.
The Mayor and the Parson looked at each other owlishly,
and decided to let it pass.
"What the Mayor is trying to say," the Parson tried again,
"is that perhaps you'd like to look for a job here in Texas."
"Fact is," the Mayor said, leaning close and looking me in
the eye, "we've got an opening for a new schoolmarm right here
in town, and we'd be right pleased if you'd take the job."
When I finally realized they were serious, I almost told
them my first reaction, which was that Luna would stop dead in
her orbit before I'd consider anything so silly as standing up
in front of a bunch of children and trying to teach them
anything. But I couldn't say that, so what I told them was that
I'd think about it, which seemed to satisfy them.
I remember sitting with Dora, my arm around her, as she
sobbed her heart out. I have no memory of what she might have
been crying about, but do recall her kissing me with fiery
passion and not wanting to take no for an answer until I
steered her toward a more willing swain. Thus was my new bed
broken in. It saw a lot of use before the night was over, but
not from me.
Before that (it must have been before that; there was no
one using the bed yet, and in a oneroom cabin you'd notice a
thing like that) I taught half a dozen people my secret recipe
for Hildy's Famous Biscuits. We fired up the stove and
assembled the ingredients and baked up several batches before
the night was over. I did only the first one. After that, my
students were eager to give it a try, and they all got eaten. I
was desperate to do something for these people. I had a vague
notion that at a house-raising you were supposed to provide
food for your guests, but these people had brought their own,
so what could I do? I'd have given them anything, anything at
all.
One thing that hadn't been provided yet was an outhouse. A
rough-and-ready latrine had been dug in a suitable spot and,
considering the amount of beer drunk, saw even more use than
the bed. My worst moment that night came while squatting there
and a voice quite close said "How'd the cabin burn down,
Hildy?"
I almost fell in the trench. It was too dark to make out
drunk.
As the food reached my belly, as brain cells resumed
working in isolated clumps throughout my head, I began to
notice other things, such as that the floor was shaking. Not
bouncing up and down, just a steady, slightly scary vibration
that I finally identified as crowd noise. Andrew's locker room
was almost directly beneath the center of the Bucket of Blood.
We had come down some ringside stairs to reach it. I looked for
a clock, in vain.
"How long have we been talking?" I asked, around a
mouthful of cold cuts and bread.
"The main event is still almost half an hour away."
"That's you, isn't it?"
"Yes."
It didn't bear thinking about. I'd arrived in the early
afternoon, and there had been nine bouts listed on the fight
card before Andrew's death match. It had to be ten, eleven
o'clock.
"There's no clocks in here," I said, hoping he'd take it
as an apology.
"I won't allow them, before a fight. They distract me."
"Make you nervous?" Maybe it was a needling question. How
dare he not get nervous before a fight? His unearthly calm was
a little hard to take.
"They distract me."
I was noticing other things. It seems ridiculous to say
I'd spent so much time in such a small room and not seen it,
but I hadn't. Not that there was a lot to see. The place was as
impersonal as a hotel room, which I guess it was, in a way.
What I saw now were four telephone screens on the wall beside
him, each displaying a worried-looking face, each with the
sound turned off and the words URGENT! PICK UP! flashing
beneath the faces. I recognized two of them as people I'd seen
around Andrew the last time I'd been here. Trainers, managers,
that sort of thing.
"Looks like you'd better take care of some business," I
said. He waved it away. "Shouldn't you be, I don't know,
talking strategy with those people? Getting pep talks,
something like that?"
"I'll be glad to miss the pep talks, frankly," he said.
"It's the worst part of this ordeal." I had to admit the four
people on the phone looked more nervous than he did.
"I still better get out of your way," I said, getting up,
trying to swallow a mouthful of food. "You'd better do what you
need to do to get ready."
"With me, it was ten years," he said.
I sat back down.
I could pretend I didn't know what he was talking about,
but it would be a lie. I knew exactly what he was talking
about, and he promptly proved me right by saying:
"Ten years of false memories. That was six years ago, and
I've spent all that time looking for someone to tell about it."
"That, and trying to get yourself killed," I said.
"I know it looks that way to you. I don't see it that
way."
"But you did try to kill yourself."
"Yes, six years ago. I found there was absolutely nothing
I had the least interest in doing. I am well over two hundred
years old, and it seemed to me it had been at least a century
since I'd done anything new."
"You were bored."
"It went a lot deeper than that. Depressed, uninterested .
. . once I spent three days simply sitting in the bathtub. I
saw no reason to get out. I decided to end my life, and it
wasn't an easy decision for me. I was raised to believe that
life is a precious gift, that there is always something useful
you can do with it. But I could no longer find anything
meaningful."
He was a lot better at telling it than I had been. He'd
had longer to practice it, in his own mind, at least. He just
hit all the high points, saying several times that he'd fill me
in on the details when he got back from the fight. Briefly, he
had been marooned on an island that sounded very much like
Scarpa, only tougher. He'd had to work very hard. He suffered
many setbacks, and never achieved anything like the comforts
granted to me. It was only in the last two years of his
ten-year stay that things eased up a bit.
"It sounds like the CC put you through the same basic
program," he said. "From what you describe, it's been improved
some; new technology, new subroutines. I accepted it at the
time, of course--I didn't have any choice, since they weren't
my memories--but reviewing it afterwards the realism factor
does not seem so high as what you experienced."
"The CC said he'd gotten better at that."
"He's forever improving."
"It must have been hell."
"I loved every second of it." He let that hang for a
moment, then leaned forward slightly, his already-intense eyes
blazing. "When life is simple like that, you have no chance to
be bored. When your life hangs in the balance as a consequence
of every action you take, suicide seems such an effete,
ridiculous thing. Every organism has the survival instinct at
its very core. That so many humans kill themselves--not just
now, they have been doing it for a long time-says a lot about
civilization, about 'intelligence.' Suicides have lost an
ability that every amoeba possesses: the knowledge of how to
live."
"So that's the secret of life?" I asked. "Hardship?
Earning what you get out of life, working for it?"
"I don't know." He got up and began pacing. "I was
exhilarated when I returned to the here and now. I thought I
had an answer. Then I realized, as you did, that I couldn't
trust it. It wasn't me living those ten years. It was a machine
writing a script about how he thought I would have lived them.
He got some of it right, but a lot more wrong, because . . . it
wasn't me. The me he was trying to imitate had just tried to
end his life. The me the CC imagined worked like a dog to stay
alive. It was the CC's wish-fulfillment, not mine."
"But you said--"
"But it was an answer," he said, whirling to face me.
"What I found out was that, for well over a century, I'd had
nothing at risk! Whether I succeeded or failed at something had
no meaning for me, because my life was not at stake. Not even
my comfort was really at stake. If I succeeded or failed
financially, for instance. If I succeeded, I'd simply win more
things that had long ago lost their meaning. If I failed, I
would lose some of these things, but the State would take care
of my basic needs."
I wanted to say something, to argue with him, but he was
on a roll, and it was just as well, because even if I did
disagree with him here and there, it was exciting simply to be
able to talk about it with someone who knew.
"That's when I started fighting death matches," he said.
"I had to re-introduce an element of risk into my life." He
held up a hand. "Not too much risk; I'm very good at what I
do." And now he smiled, and it was beautiful. "And I do want to
live again. That's what you've got to do, Hildy. You've got to
find a way to experience risk again. It's a tonic like nothing
I ever imagined."
The questions were lining up in my mind, clamoring to get
out. There was one more important than all the others.
"What's to prevent the CC," I said, slowly, "from reviving
you again, like he did to me, if you . . . make a mistake?"
"I will, someday. Everybody does. I think it will be a
long time yet."
"There's lots of people gunning for you."
"I'm going to retire soon. A few more matches, that's
all."
"What about the tonic?"
He smiled again. "I think I've had enough of it. I needed
it, I needed to have the death matches . . . and nothing else
would have worked. That's the beauty of it. To die so publicly
. . ."
I saw it then. The CC wouldn't dare revive Silvio, for
instance (not that he could; Silvio's brain had been
destroyed). Everybody knew Silvio was dead, and if he suddenly
showed up again embarrassing questions would be asked.
Committees would be formed, petitions circulated, programming
re-examined. Andrew had found the obvious way to beat the CC's
little resurrection game, an answer so obvious that I had never
thought of it.
Or had I, and simply kept it buried?
That would have to be a question for later as, with an
apologetic shrug, Andrew opened his door and half of King City
spilled into the room, all talking at once. Well, fifteen or
twenty people, anyway, most of them angry. I collected a few
glares and tried to make myself small in one corner of the room
and watch as agents, trainers, managers, Arena reps, and media
types all tried to compress an hour's worth of psyching up,
legalities, and interviews into the five minutes left to them
before the match was due to start. Andrew remained an island of
calm in the center of this hurricane, which rivaled any press
conference I've ever attended for sheer confusion.
Then he was gone, trailing them all behind him like
yapping puppies. The noise faded down the short corridor and up
the stairs and I heard the crowd noise grow louder and the bass
mumble that was all I could hear of the announcer's voice from
this deep below the ring.
The noise stayed at that level for a while, then decreased
a little, as I sat down to wait for his return.
Then it grew to a pitch I thought might endanger the
building. Fans, I thought, contemptuously.
If anything, it grew even louder, and I began to wonder
what was going on.
And then they brought Andrew MacDonald back on a
stretcher.
#
Nothing is ever as straightforward as it at first seems.
Andrew was fighting a death match . . . but what did that mean?
I had no idea, myself. Having seen just a few matches, I
knew that blows were delivered routinely that would not have
been survivable without modern medical techniques. I had
witnessed medical attention being administered between rounds,
combatants being patched up, body fluids being replaced. The
normal sign of victory was the removal of the loser's head, one
of the many endearing things about slash-boxing and surely a
sign that things weren't going well for the beheadee . . . but
what about the Grand Flack? He did quite well without a body.
The only surely fatal wound these days was the destruction of
the brain, and the CC was working on that one.
It seemed the rules were different for a death match. It
also seemed no one was really happy about them, except possibly
for Andrew.
I could not tell what his injuries were, but his head was
still on his shoulders. The body was covered with a sheet,
which was soaked in blood. I gathered, later, that a hierarchy
of wounds had been established for death matches, that some
could be treated by ringside handlers between rounds, and that
others had to be acknowledged as fatal. The fallen opponent was
not decapitated, it being thought too gruesome to hold aloft an
actual dead severed head. I was told the ritual took the place
of the coup de grace, that it was meant to be symbolic of
victory in some way. Go figure that one out.
I also learned, later, that no one really knew how to
handle the situation they now found themselves in. Only three
fighters had ever engaged in death matches since they were
allowed into a gray area of legality known as consensual
suicide. Only one had ever met the requirements for a death
wound, and he had experienced a deathbed revelation that could
be summed up as "maybe this wasn't such a good idea, after
all," been revived, stitched up, and retired in disgrace to
everyone's considerable secret relief. Of the two people
currently risking their lives in fights, it had been tacitly
agreed long ago that they would never meet each other, as the
certain outcome of such a match would be the pickle the
handlers, lawyers, and Arena management now found themselves
in, which might be expressed as "are we really going to let
this silly son of a bitch die on us?"
There was not a lot of time to come up with an answer. I
could hear a sound coming from Andrew, all the way across the
room, and knew I was hearing the death rattle.
I couldn't see much of him. If he'd hoped his final
moments would be peaceful, he'd been a fool. A dozen people
crowded around, some feverish to offer aid, others worrying
about corporate liability, a very few standing up for Andrew's
right to die as he pleased.
The Bucket of Blood management had for years been in a
quandary concerning death matches. On the one hand, they were a
guaranteed draw; stadia were always filled when the titillation
of a possible actual death was offered. On the other, no one
knew what the public reaction would be if someone actually died
right out there in front of God and everyone, for the glory of
sport. The prevailing opinion was it would not be good for
business. The public's appetite for non-injurious violence in
sport and entertainment had never been plumbed, but real death,
though always good for a sensation, was much easier to take if
it could be seen as an accident, like David Earth, or Nirvana.
To give them credit, the Arena people were queasy about
the whole idea, and not just from a legal standpoint. Their
worst sin in the matter was something we all do, which is fail
to imagine the worst happening. No one had died in a death
match yet, and they'd kept hoping no one would. Now someone
was.
But not without a last-ditch effort. The people around him
reminded me, as things in life so often do, of scenes from
movies. You've seen them: in a war picture, when medics gather
around a wounded comrade trying to save his life, buddies at
his side telling him everything's gonna be okay, kid, you've
got a million-dollar wound there, you'll be home with the babes
before you know it, and their eyes saying this one's a goner.
And this seems weird, maybe it was a trick of the light, but I
saw another scene, the priest leaning over the bed, holding a
rosary, hearing the last confession, giving the last rites.
What they were really doing was trying to talk him into
accepting treatment, please, so we can all go home and wipe our
brows and have a few stiff drinks and pretend this fucking
disaster never happened, dear lord.
He refused them all. Gradually their pleas grew less
impassioned, and a few even gave up and retreated to the wall
near me, like what he had was contagious. And finally someone
leaned close enough to hear what it was he'd been trying to
say, and that someone looked over at me and beckoned.
I'm surprised I made it, as I had no feeling in my legs.
But somehow I was leaning over him, into the stench of his
blood, his entrails, the smell of death on him now, and he
grabbed my hand with an amazing strength and tried to lift
himself closer to my ear because he didn't have much of a voice
left. I hope he wasn't feeling any pain; they said he wasn't,
pain wasn't his thing, he'd been deadened before the match. He
coughed.
"Let them help you, Andrew," I said. "You've proved your
point."
"No point," he coughed. "Nothing to prove, to them."
"You're sure? It's no disgrace. I'll still respect you."
"Not about respect. Gotta go through with it, or it didn't
mean anything."
"That's crazy. You could have died in any of them. You
don't have to die now to validate that."
He shook his head, and coughed horribly. He went limp, and
I thought he was dead, but then his hand put a little pressure
on mine again, and I leaned closer to his lips.
"Tricked," he said, and died.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
It's a well-known fact that nobody goes to the library in
this day and age. It's also wrong.
Why take the time and trouble to travel to a big building
where actual books on actual paper are stored when you can stay
at home and access any of that information, plus trillions of
pages of data that exist only in the memories? If you don't
already know the answer to that question, then you just don't
love books, and I'll never be able to explain it to you. But if
you get up from your terminal right now, any time of the day or
night, take the tube down to the King City Civic Center Plaza,
and walk up the Italian marble steps between the statues of
Knowledge and Wisdom, you will find the Great Hall of Books
thrumming with the kind of quiet activity that has
characterized great libraries since books were on papyrus
scrolls. Do it someday. Stroll past the rows of scholars at the
old oak tables, stand in the center of the dome, beside the
Austin Gutenberg Bible in its glass case, look down the
infinite rows of shelves radiating away from you. If you love
books at all, it will soothe your mind.
Soothing was something my mind was sorely in need of. In
the three or four days following the death of Andrew MacDonald,
I spent a lot of time at the library. There was no practical
reason for it; though I was now homeless, I could have done the
reading and research I now engaged in sitting in the park, or
in my hotel room. Few of the things I looked at actually
existed on paper anyway. I spent my time looking at a library
terminal no different from the ones in any streetcorner phone
box. But I was far from the only one so engaged. Though many
people used the library because they liked holding the actual
source material in their hands, most were accessing stored
data, and simply preferred to do it with real books on shelves
around them. Let's face it, the vast majority of books in the
King City Library were quite old, the pre-Invasion legacy of a
few bibliophile fanatics who insisted the yellowing, fragile,
inefficient and inconvenient old things were necessary to any
culture that called itself civilized, who convinced the
software types that the logically unjustifiable expense of
shipping them up here was, in the end, worth it. As for new
books . . . why bother? I doubt more than six or seven new
works were published on paper in a typical Lunar year. There
was a small publishing business, never very profitable, because
some people liked to have sets of the classics sitting on a
shelf in the living room. Books had become almost entirely the
province of interior decorators.
But not here. These books were used. Many had to be stored
in special inert-gas rooms and you had to don a p-suit to
handle them, under the watchful eyes of librarians who thought
dog-earing should be a hanging offense, but every volume in the
institution was available for reference, right up to the
Gutenberg. Almost a million books sat on open shelves. You
could walk down the rows and run your hand over them, pull one
down and open it (carefully, carefully!), smell the old paper
and glue and dust. I did most of my work with a copy of Tom
Sawyer open on the table beside me, partly so I could read a
chapter when I got tired of the research, partly so I could
just touch it when I felt at my lowest.
I'd had to keep redefining "lowest." I was beginning to
wonder if there was a natural lower limit, if this was the
limit I had reached the last times, when I had attempted to
kill myself, would have killed myself without the CC's
intervention.
My research concerned, naturally enough, suicide. It
didn't take me long to discover that not much useful was really
known about it. Why should that have surprised me? Not much
really useful was known concerning anything relating to why we
are what we are and do what we do.
There's plenty of behavioristic data: stimulus A evokes
response B. There's lots of statistical data as well: X percent
will react in such-andsuch a way to event Y. It all worked very
well with insects, frogs, fish and such, tolerably good with
dogs and cats and mice, even reasonably decent with human
beings. But then you pose a question like why, when Aunt
Betty's boy Wilbur got run over by the paving machine, did she
up and stick her head in the microwave, while her sister Gloria
who'd suffered a similar loss grieved, mourned, recovered, and
went on to lead a long and useful life? Best extremely
scientific answer to date: It beats the shit out of me.
Another reason for being in the library was that it was
the perfect place to go at a problem in a logical way. The
whole environment seemed to encourage it. And that's what I
intended to do. Andrew's death had really rocked me. I had
nothing else that needed doing, so I was going to attack my
problem by going at it a step at a time, which meant that first
I had to define the steps. Step one, it seemed to me, was to
learn all I could about the causes of suicide. After three days
of almost constant reading and note-taking I had it down to
four, maybe five categories of suicide. (I bought a pad of
paper and pencil to take notes with, which earned me a few
sidelong glances from my neighbors. Even in these fusty
environs writing on paper was seen as eccentric.) These four,
maybe five categories were not hardedged, they overlapped each
other with big, fuzzy gray borders. Again, no surprise.
The first and easiest to identify was cultural. Most
societies condemned suicide in most circumstances, but some did
not. Japan was an outstanding example. In ancient Japan suicide
was not only condoned, but mandatory in some circumstances.
Further, it was actually institutionalized, so that one who had
lost honor must not only kill himself, but do it in a
prescribed, public, and very painful way. Many other cultures
looked on suicide, in certain circumstances, as an honorable
thing to do.
Even in societies where suicide was frowned on or viewed
as a mortal sin, there were circumstances where it was at least
understandable. I encountered many tales both in folklore and
reality of frustrated lovers leaping off a cliff hand in hand.
There were also the cases of elderly people in intractable pain
(see Reason #2), and several other marginally acceptable
reasons.
Most early cultures were very tough to analyze.
Demographics, as we know it, didn't really get its start until
recently. Records were kept of births and deaths and not much
else. How do you determine what the suicide rate was in ancient
Babylon? You don't. You can't even learn much useful about
Nineteenth Century Europe. There were blips in the data here
and there. In the Twentieth Century it was said that Swedes
killed themselves at a rate higher than their contemporaries.
Some blamed the cold weather, the long winters, but how then do
you account for the Finns, the Norwegians, the Siberians?
Others said it was the dour nature of the Swedes themselves.
I've been asking people questions for long enough to know
something important about them: they lie. They lie often enough
even when nothing is at stake. When the answer can mean
something as important as whether or not Grandpa Jacques gets
buried in the hallowed ground of the churchyard, suicide notes
have a way of vanishing, bodies get re-arranged, coroners and
law officers get bribed or simply look the other way out of
respect for the family. The blip in suicide data for the Swedes
could simply have meant they were more straightforward about
reporting it.
As for Lunar society, post-Invasion society in general . .
. it was a civil right, but it was widely viewed as the
coward's way out. Suicide was not something that was going to
earn you any points with the neighbors.
The second reason was best summed up in the statement "I
can't go on like this anymore." The most obvious of these cases
involved pain, and no longer applied. Then there was
unhappiness. What can you say about unhappiness? It is real,
and can have real and easily seen causes: disappointment with
one's accomplishments in life, frustration at being unable to
attain a goal or an object, tragedy, loss. Other times, the
cause of this hopeless feeling can be difficult to see to the
outside observer: "He had everything to live for."
Then there was the reason Andrew proclaimed, that he had
been bored. This happened even in the days when people didn't
live to be two, three hundred years old, but rarely. It was a
reason appearing in more and more suicide notes as life spans
lengthened.
The fourth reason might be called the inability to
visualize death. Children were vulnerable to this one; many
affluent, industrial societies reported increasing teen-age
suicide rates, and survivors of failed attempts often revealed
elaborate fantasies of being aware at their own funerals, of
getting back at their tormenters: "I'll show them, they'll miss
me when I'm gone."
That's why I said I had maybe five reasons. I couldn't
decide if the attempts, successful or not, known as "gestures"
rated a category of their own. Authorities differed as to how
many suicides were merely cries for help. In a sense, all of
them were, if only to an indifferent Providence. Help me stop
the pain, help me find love, help me find a reason, help me,
I'm hurting . . .
Did I say maybe five? Maybe six.
Maybe six was what I thought of as "The Seasons Of Life."
We are, most of us, closet numerologists, subconscious
astrologers. We are fascinated with anniversaries, birthdays,
ages of ourselves and others. You are in your thirties, or
forties, or seventies, or you're over one hundred. Back when
people lived their fourscore years, on average, those words
said even more than they do today. Turning forty meant your
life was half over, and was a portentous time to examine what
the first half had been like and, often as not, find it
lacking. Turning ninety meant you'd already outlived your
allotted time, and the most useful thing left to you was
selecting the color of your coffin.
Ages with a zero on the end were a particularly stressful
time. They still are. One term I encountered was "mid-life
crisis," used back when mid-life was somewhere between 40 and
50. Ages with two zeros on the end pack one hell of a wallop.
Newspapers used to run stories about centenarians. The data I
studied said that, even though it might now be thought of as
mid-life, the age of one zero zero still meant a lot. While you
could be in your eighties, or your nineties, you were never in
your hundreds. That term just never attained popular usage. You
were "over one hundred," or "over two hundred." Soon there
would be people over three hundred years old. And there was a
rise in the suicide rate at both these magical milestones.
Which was of particular interest to me because . . . now
how old did Hildy say she was, class? Let's not always see the
same hands.
#
I don't know if my research was really telling me much,
but it was something to do, and I intended to keep on doing it.
I became a library gnome, going out only to sleep and eat. But
after four days something told me it was time to take a walk,
and my feet drew me back to Texas.
I was wondering what could happen to me next. Death had
dogged my steps from the time of my return from Scarpa Island:
David Earth, Silvio, Andrew, eleven hundred and twenty-six
souls in Nirvana. Three brontosaurs. Was I forgetting anybody?
Was anything good ever going to happen to me?
I sneaked in a back way I had found during my hiding-out
days. I didn't want to encounter any of my friends from New
Austin, I didn't want to have to try to explain to them why I'd
torched my own cabin. If I couldn't explain it to myself, what
was I going to say to them? So I came over the hill from a
different direction and my first thought was I must be lost,
because there was a cabin over there. Then I thought, maybe for
the first time since this ordeal began, that I might be losing
my mind, because I wasn't lost, I was where I thought I was,
and that was my cabin, intact, just as it had been before I
watched it consumed by flames.
You can get a genuine dizzy feeling at a time like that; I
sat down. After a moment I noticed two things that might be of
interest. First, the cabin was not quite where it had been. It
looked to have been moved about three meters up the slope of
the hill. Second, there was a pile of what looked like charred
lumber down in the slight depression I'd been calling "the
gully." As I watched, a third item of interest appeared: a
heavily-loaded burro came around the side of the house, looked
at me briefly, and then stuck his nose into a bucket of water
that had been left in the shade.
I got up and started toward the cabin as a man came out
the front door and began lifting the burdens from the beast and
setting them on the ground. He must have heard me, because he
looked up, grinned toothlessly, and waved at me. I knew him.
"Sourdough," I called out to him. "What the hell are you
doing?"
"Evening, Hildy," he said. "Hope you don't mind. I just
got into town and they sent me up here, said to stick around a
few days and let them know when you got back."
"You're always welcome, Sourdough, you know that. Mi casa
es tu casa. It's just . . ." I paused, looked over the cabin
again, and wiped sweat from my forehead. "I didn't think I had
a casa."
He scratched himself, and spat in the dust.
"Well, I don't know much about that. All I know's Mayor
Dillon said if'n I didn't give a holler when you got back to
these here parts, he'd skin me and Matilda." He patted the
burro affectionately, raising a cloud of dust.
Maybe old Sourdough laid on the accent and the Old West
slang a bit thick, but I felt he was entitled. He was a real
Natural, as opposed to Walter, who was only natural on the
surface.
He belonged to a religious sect that had some things in
common with the Christian Scientists. They didn't refuse all
medical help, nor did they pray for a cure when they were sick.
What they rejected was rejuvenation. They allowed themselves to
grow old and, when the measures needed to keep them alive
reached a point Sourdough had described to me as "just too dang
much trouble," they died.
There was even some money in it. The Antiquities Board
paid them a small annual stipend for having the grace to let
them avoid what would have been a tricky ethical problem, which
was maintaining a small control group of humans untouched by
most modern medical advances.
Sourdough was one of the handful of prospectors who roamed
West Texas. His chances of discovering a vein of gold or silver
were slim--zero, actually, since nothing like that had been
included in the specs when the place was built. But the
management assured us there were three pockets of
diamond-bearing minerals somewhere in Texas. No one had found
any of them yet. Sourdough and three or four others ranged over
the land with their pickaxes and grubstakes and burros, perhaps
secretly hoping they'd never find them. After all, what would
you do with a handful of diamonds? It certainly didn't justify
all that work.
I'd asked Sourdough about that, early on, before I'd
learned it was impolite to ask such questions in an historical
disney.
"I'll tell you, Hildy," he'd said, not taking offense. "I
worked forty years at a job I didn't particularly like. I'm not
quite the fool I sound; I didn't realize how much I disliked it
until I quit. But when I retired I come out here and I liked
the sunshine and the heat and the open air. I found I'd pretty
much lost my taste for the company of people. I can only take
'em in small doses now. And I've been happy. Matilda is the
only company I need, and prospecting gives me something to do."
In fact, Matilda seemed to be his only remaining worry in
life. He was concerned about her welfare after he was gone. He
was constantly asking people if they'd see to her needs, to the
point that half the people in New Austin had promised to adopt
the damn donkey.
He looked older than Adam's granddaddy. All his teeth were
gone, and most of his hair. His skin was mottled and wrinkled
and loose on his scrawny frame and his knuckles were swollen to
the size of walnuts.
He was eighty-three years old, seventeen years younger
than me.
I'd had him pegged as an illit, and the job he'd hated as
something on the order of the carrying of hods, whatever they
were, or the laying of bricks. Then Dora told me he'd been the
Chairman of the Board of the third largest company on Mars.
He'd retired to Luna for the gravity.
"What happened here, Sourdough?" I asked. "I didn't sell
the land. What gives somebody the right to come in here and
build on it?"
"I don't know about that, either, Hildy. You know me. I've
been out in the hills, and let me tell you, girl, I'm on the
trail of something."
He went on like that for a while, with me paying minimal
attention. Sourdough and his like were always on the trail of
something. I looked around the house. There wasn't much
different between this one and the one I'd built and burned
down, except some almost indefinable things that told me the
builders had been better at it than I had been. The dimensions
were the same, the windows were in the same places. But it
looked more solid. I went inside, Sourdough trailing behind me
still yammering about the glory hole he was on the verge of
discovering. The inside was still bare except for some bright
yellow calico curtains in the windows. They were prettier than
the ones I'd installed.
I went back out, still unable to make sense of it, and
looked down the road toward New Austin in time to see the first
of a long parade arrive from town.
The next half hour is something of a blur.
More than a dozen wagons arrived in the hour of dusk. All
of them were laden with people and food and drink and other
things. The people got down and set to work, building a fire,
stringing orange paper lanterns with candles inside, clearing
an area for dancing. Someone had loaded the piano from the
saloon, and stood beside it turning the crank. There was a
banjo player and a fiddle player, both dreadful, but no one
seemed to mind. Before I quite knew what was happening there
was a full-scale hoedown going on. A cow was turning on the
spit, sizzling in barbecue sauce that hissed and popped when it
dripped into the fire. A table had been laid out with cookies
and cakes and candied fruits in mason jars. Bottles of beer
were thrust into a galvanized tub full of ice and people were
swilling it down or sipping from bottles they'd tucked away.
Petticoats and silk stockings flashed in the firelight as the
ladies from the Alamo kicked up their heels and the men stood
around whooping and hollering and clapping their hands or moved
in and tried to turn it into a square dance. All my friends
from New Austin had showed up, and a lot more I didn't even
know, and I still didn't know why.
Before things got out of hand Mayor Dillon stood up on a
table and fired his pistol three times in the air. Things got
quiet soon enough, and the Mayor swayed and would have toppled
but for the ladies on each side of him, propping him up. Next
to the Doctor, Mayor Dillon was the town's most notorious
drunk.
"Hildy," he intoned, in a voice any politician for the
last thousand years would have recognized, "when the good
citizens of New Austin heard of your recent misfortune we knew
we couldn't just let it lie. Am I right, folks?"
He was greeted with a huge cheer and a great guzzling of
beer.
"We know how it is with city folks. Insurance, filin'
claims, forms to fill out, shit like that." He belched hugely
and went on. "Well, we ain't like that. A neighbor needs a
hand, and the people of West Texas are there to help out."
"Mister Mayor," I started, tentatively, "there's been a--"
"Shut up, Hildy," he said, and belched again. "No, we
ain't like that, are we, friends?"
"NO!!" shouted the citizens of New Austin.
"No, we ain't. When misfortune befalls one of us, it
befalls us all. Maybe I shouldn't say it, Hildy, but when you
showed up here, some of us figured you for a weekender." He
thumped himself on the chest and leaned forward, almost
toppling once more, his eyes bulging as if daring me to
disbelieve the incredible statement he was about to make. "I
figured you for a weekender, Hildy, me, Mayor Matthew Thomas
Dillon, mayor of this great town nigh these seven years." He
hung his head theatrically. Then his head popped up, as if on a
spring. "But we were wrong. In this last little while, you've
showed yourself a true Texan. You built yourself a cabin. You
came into town and sat down with us, drank with us, ate with
us, gambled with us."
"Gambled, hah!" Sourdough mumbled. "That weren't
gamblin'." He got a lot of laughs.
"Mayor Dillon," I pleaded, "please let me say-"
"Not until I've said my piece," he roared, amiably. "Then,
four days ago, disaster struck. And let me say there's those of
us who aren't completely cut off from the outside world, Hildy,
there's those of us who keep up. We knew you'd just lost your
job on the outside, and we figured you were trying to make a
new start here in God's Country. Now, back outside, where you
come from, folks would have just tsk-tsked about it and said
what a shame. Not Texans. So here it is, Hildy," and he swept
his arm in a huge circle meant to indicate the spanking new
cabin, and this time he did fall from the table, taking his
bargirl escort with him. But he popped up like a cork, dignity
intact. "That there's your new house, and this here's your
housewarming party."
Which I'd figured out shortly after he'd mounted the
table. And oh, dear god, did ever woman feel such mixed
emotions.
#
How I got through that night I'll never know.
Following the speech came the giving of gifts. I got
everything from the ritual bread and salt from my ex-wife,
Dora, to a spanking new cast-iron cook stove from the owner of
the general store. I accepted a rocking chair and a pair of
pigs, who promptly got loose and led everyone a merry chase.
There was a new bed and two hand-sewn quilts to put on it. I
was gifted with apple pies and fireplace tools, a roll of
chicken wire and a china tea set, bars of soap rendered from
lard, a sack of nails, five chickens, an iron skillet . . . the
list went on and on. Rich or poor, everyone for miles around
gave me something. When a little girl came up and gave me a tea
cozy she'd crocheted herself I finally broke down and cried. It
was a relief in a way; I'd been smiling so hard and so long I
thought my face would crack. It went over well. Everyone patted
me on the back and there was not a dry eye in the house.
Then the night's festivities began in earnest. The beef
was sliced and the beans dished out, plates were heaped high,
and people sat around gorging themselves. I drank everything
that was handed to me, but I never felt like I got drunk. I
must have been, to some degree, because the rest of the evening
exists for me as a series of unconnected scenes.
One I remember was me, the Mayor, and Sourdough sitting on
a log before the fire with a square dance happening behind us.
We must have been talking, but I have no idea what we'd been
talking about. Memory returns as the Mayor says:
"Hildy, some of us were sitting around talking over to the
Alamo Saloon the other day."
"You tell her, Mayor Dillon," a girl shouted behind us,
then whirled away into the dance again.
"Harrumph," said the Mayor. "I need to drop in at the
saloon from time to time to keep up on the needs of my
constituents, you see."
"Sure, Mayor Dillon," I said, knowing he spent an average
of six hours each day at his usual table, and if what he'd been
doing was feeling the pulse of the public then the voters of
New Austin were the most thoroughly kept-up-on since the
invention of democracy. Perhaps that accounted for the huge
majorities he regularly achieved. Or maybe it was the fact that
he ran unopposed.
"The consensus is, Hildy," he intoned, "that you'll never
make a farmer."
That should have come as news to no one. Aside from the
fact that I doubted I had any talent for it and had not, in
fact, had any plans to farm in the first place, nobody had ever
run a successful farm in the Great Big Bubble known as West
Texas. To farm, you need water, lots and lots of it. You could
raise a vegetable garden, run cattle--though goats were
better--and hogs seemed to thrive, but farming was right out.
"I think you're right," I said, and drank from the mason
jar in my hand. As I did, the Parson sat next to me, and drank
from his mason jar.
"We don't really know if you plan to stay here," the Mayor
went on. "We don't mean to pressure you either way; maybe you
have plans for another job on the outside." He raised his
eyebrows, then his mason jar.
"Not particularly."
"Well then." He seemed about to go on, then looked
puzzled. I'd been that drunk before, and knew the feeling. He
hadn't a clue as to what he'd been about to say.
"What the Mayor is trying to say," the Parson chimed in,
tactfully, "is that a life of salooncrawling and gambling may
not be the best for you."
"Gambling, hah!" Sourdough put in. "That lady don't
gamble."
"Shut up, Sourdough," the Mayor said.
"Well, she don't!" he said, defiantly. "Not three weeks
ago, when she turned up that fourth ace with the biggest pot of
the night, I knowed she was cheating!"
These would have been fighting words from almost anybody
but Sourdough. Had they been uttered in the Alamo they'd have
been reason enough to overturn the table and start shooting at
each other--to the delight of the manufacturers of blank
cartridges and the amusement of the tourists at the adjoining
tables. From Sourdough, I decided to let it pass, especially
since it was true. The big pot he mentioned, by the way, was
about thirty-five cents.
"Calm down," said the Parson. "If you think someone is
cheating, you should say so right then and there."
"Couldn't!" Sourdough said. "Didn't know how she done it."
"Then she probably didn't."
"She sure as hell did. I know what I dealt her!" he said,
triumphantly.
The Mayor and the Parson looked at each other owlishly,
and decided to let it pass.
"What the Mayor is trying to say," the Parson tried again,
"is that perhaps you'd like to look for a job here in Texas."
"Fact is," the Mayor said, leaning close and looking me in
the eye, "we've got an opening for a new schoolmarm right here
in town, and we'd be right pleased if you'd take the job."
When I finally realized they were serious, I almost told
them my first reaction, which was that Luna would stop dead in
her orbit before I'd consider anything so silly as standing up
in front of a bunch of children and trying to teach them
anything. But I couldn't say that, so what I told them was that
I'd think about it, which seemed to satisfy them.
I remember sitting with Dora, my arm around her, as she
sobbed her heart out. I have no memory of what she might have
been crying about, but do recall her kissing me with fiery
passion and not wanting to take no for an answer until I
steered her toward a more willing swain. Thus was my new bed
broken in. It saw a lot of use before the night was over, but
not from me.
Before that (it must have been before that; there was no
one using the bed yet, and in a oneroom cabin you'd notice a
thing like that) I taught half a dozen people my secret recipe
for Hildy's Famous Biscuits. We fired up the stove and
assembled the ingredients and baked up several batches before
the night was over. I did only the first one. After that, my
students were eager to give it a try, and they all got eaten. I
was desperate to do something for these people. I had a vague
notion that at a house-raising you were supposed to provide
food for your guests, but these people had brought their own,
so what could I do? I'd have given them anything, anything at
all.
One thing that hadn't been provided yet was an outhouse. A
rough-and-ready latrine had been dug in a suitable spot and,
considering the amount of beer drunk, saw even more use than
the bed. My worst moment that night came while squatting there
and a voice quite close said "How'd the cabin burn down,
Hildy?"
I almost fell in the trench. It was too dark to make out