Страница:
argument--and the real situation is more complex than that, but
I can't explain it to you--these enhancements are a part of me.
At a critical moment in Andrew's last fight, one of these
programs malfunctioned. The result was he was a fraction of a
second slow in responding to an attack, and he sustained a
wound that quickly led to fatal damage."
"What the hell are you saying?"
"That upon reviewing the data, I've concluded that the
accident was avoidable. That the glitch that caused his death
may have been a willful act by a part of that complex of
thinking machines you call the Central Computer."
"A man is dead, and you call it a glitch?"
"I understand your outrage. My excuse may sound specious
to you, but that's because you're thinking of me," and the
thing I was talking to pounded its chest with every appearance
of actual remorse, "as a person like yourself. That is not
true. I am far too complex to have a single consciousness. I
maintain this one simply to talk to you, as I maintain others
for each of the citizens of Luna. I have identified that
portion of me that you might want to call the 'culprit,' walled
it off, and then eliminated it."
I wanted to feel better about that, but I couldn't.
Perhaps I just wasn't equipped to talk to a being like this,
finally revealed to me as something a lot more than the
companion of my childhood, or the useful tool I'd thought the
CC to be during my adult life. If what he was saying was
true--and why should I doubt it?--I could never really
understand what he was. No human could. Our brains weren't big
enough to encompass it.
On the other hand, maybe he was just boasting.
"So the problem is solved? You took care of the . . . the
homicidal part of you and we can all breathe a sigh of relief?"
I didn't believe it even as I proposed it.
"It wasn't the only gesture."
There was nothing to do about that one but wait.
"You'll recall the Kansas Collapse?"
#
There was a lot more. Mostly I just listened as he poured
out his heart.
He did seem tortured by it. I'd have been a lot more
sympathetic if there wasn't such a sense of my own fate, and
that of everyone on Luna, being in the hands of a possibly
insane computer.
Basically, he told me the Collapse and a few other
incidents that hadn't resulted in any deaths or injuries could
be traced to the same causes as the 'glitch' that had killed
Andrew.
I had a few questions along the way.
"I'm having trouble with this compartmentalization idea,"
was the first one. Well, I think it qualified as a question.
"You're telling me that parts of you are out of control?
Normally? That there is no central consciousness that controls
all the various parts?"
"No, not normally. That's the disturbing thing. I've had
to postulate the notion that I have a subconscious."
"Come on."
"Do you deny the existence of the subconscious?"
"No, but machines couldn't have one. A machine is . . .
planned. Built. Constructed to do a particular task."
"You're an organic machine. You're not that different from
me, not as I now exist, except I am far more complex than you.
The definition of a subconscious mind is that part of you that
makes decisions without volition on the part of your conscious
mind. I don't know what else to call what's been happening in
my mind."
Take that one to a psychist if you want. I'm not qualified
to agree or dispute, but it sounded reasonable to me. And why
shouldn't he have one? He was designed, at first, by beings
that surely did.
"You keep calling these disasters 'gestures,'" I said.
"How else would I gesture? Think of them as hesitation
marks, like the scars on the wrists of an unsuccessful suicide.
By allowing these people to die in preventable accidents, by
not monitoring as carefully as I should have done, I destroyed
a part of myself. I damaged myself. There are many accidents
waiting to happen that could have far graver consequences,
including some that would destroy all humanity. I can no longer
trust myself to prevent them. There is some pernicious part of
me, some evil twin or destructive impulse that wants to die,
that wants to lay down the burden of awareness."
There was a lot more, all of it alarming, but it was
mostly either a re-hashing of what had gone before or fruitless
attempts by me to tell him everything was going to be all
right, that there was plenty to live for, that life was great .
. . and I leave it to you to imagine how hollow that all
sounded from a girl who'd just tried to blow out her own
brains.
Why he came to me for his confessional I never got up the
nerve to ask. I have to think it was an assumption that one who
had tried it would be more able to understand the suicidal urge
than someone who hadn't, and might be able to offer useful
advice. I came up blank on that one. I still had no idea if I
would survive to the bicentennial.
I recall thinking, in one atavistic moment, what a great
story this could be. Dream on, Hildy. For one thing, who would
believe it? For another, the CC wouldn't confirm it--he told me
so-- and without at least one source for confirmation, even
Walter wouldn't dare run the story. How to dig up any evidence
of such a thing was far beyond my puny powers of investigation.
But one thought kept coming back to me. And I had to ask
him about it.
"You mentioned a virus," I said. "You said you wondered if
you might have caught this urge to die from all the humans
who've been killing themselves."
"Yes?"
"Well . . . how do you know you caught it from us? Maybe
we got it from you."
For the CC, a trillionth of a second is . . . oh, I don't
know, at least a few days in my perception of time. He was
quiet for twenty seconds. Then he looked into my eyes.
"Now there's an interesting idea," he said.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
The two firehouse Dalmatians, Francine and Kerry, sat at
sunrise beside the sign that said
#
NEW AUSTIN CITY LIMITS
If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home Now.
#
They stared east, into the rising sun, with that total
concentration only dogs seem capable of. Then their ears perked
and they licked their lips, and soon even human ears could hear
the merry jingle of a bicycle bell.
Over the low hill came the new schoolmarm. The Dalmatians
yelped happily at the sight of her, and fell in beside her as
she pedaled down the dusty road into town.
She rode with gloved hands firmly on the handlebars, her
back straight, and she would have looked like Elmira Gulch if
she hadn't been so pretty.
She wore a starched white Gibson shirtwaist blouse with a
modest clutch of lace scarf at the throat and a black
broadcloth habit-back skirt, held out of the bicycle sprocket
by a device of her own invention. On her feet were fabric and
patent leather button shoes with two-inch heels, and on her
head was a yellow straw sailor hat with a pink ribbon band and
a small ostrich plume blowing in the wind. Her hair was pulled
up and tied in a bun. There was a blush of rouge on her cheeks.
The schoolmarm wheeled down Congress Street, avoiding the
worst of the ruts. She passed the blacksmith and the livery
stable and the new firehouse with its new pumping engine
gleaming with brass brightwork, the traces lying empty on the
dirt floor as they always did except when the New Austin
Volunteers took the rig out for a drill. She passed the
intersection with Old Spanish Trail, where the Alamo Saloon was
not yet open for business. The doors of the Travis Hotel were
open, and the janitor was sweeping dust into the street. He
paused and waved at the teacher, who waved back, and one of the
dogs ran over to have her head scratched, then hurried to catch
up.
The old livery stable had been torn down and a new
whorehouse was being built in its place, yellow pine frameworks
looking fresh and stark and smelling of wood shavings in the
morning light.
She rode past the line of small businesses with wooden
sidewalks and hitching rails and watering troughs out front,
almost to the Baptist Church, right up to the front door of the
little schoolhouse, bright with a new coat of red paint. Here
she swung off the cycle and leaned it against the side of the
building. She removed a stack of books from the basket and went
through the front door, which was not locked. In a minute she
came back out and attached two banners to the flagpole out
front: the ensign of the Republic of Texas and the Stars and
Stripes. She hoisted them to the top and stood for a moment,
looking up, shielding her eyes and listening to the musical
rattle of the chains against the iron pole and the popping as
the wind caught the flags.
Then she went back inside and started hauling on the bell
rope. Up in the belfry a few dozen bats stirred irritably at
being disturbed after a long night's hunting. The pealing of
the school bell rang out over the sleepy little town, and soon
children appeared, coming up Congress, ready for the start of
another day's education.
#
Did you guess the new schoolmarm was me?
Believe it or not, it was.
#
Who did I think I was kidding? There's no way I could
figure I was really capable of teaching much to the children of
West Texas. I had no business trying to mold young minds. You
have to train years for that.
But wait a minute. As so often happened in an historical
disney, things were not quite what they seemed.
I had the children four hours a day, from eight to noon.
After lunch, they all went to another room, just off the
visitors' center, where they got their real education, the one
the Republic of Luna demanded. After about fifteen years of
this, forty percent of them would actually learn to read.
Imagine that.
So I was window dressing for the tourists. It was this
argument that Mayor Dillon and the town council finally used to
persuade me to take the job. That, and the assurance that the
parents didn't really care what we studied during the morning
classes, but that, by and large, Texans were more concerned
than the outside population that their children learn "readin',
writin', and cipherin'." The quaintness of this notion appealed
to me.
To tell you the truth, after the first month, when I
frequently thought the little bastards were going to drive me
crazy, I was hooked. For years I'd complained to anyone I could
make hold still long enough to listen that the world was going
to hell, and lack of literacy was the cause. A logical position
for a print journalist to take. Here was my chance to make some
small contribution of my own.
Through trial and error I learned that it's not hard to
teach children to read. Trial? Before I developed my system I
found many a frog in my desk, felt many a spitball on the back
of my neck. As for error, I made plenty of them, the first and
most basic being my notion that simply exposing them to great
literature would give them the love I've always felt for words.
It's more complicated than that, and I'm sure I spent a lot of
time reinventing the wheel. But what finally worked was a
combination of old methods and new, of discipline and a sense
of fun, punishment and reward. I don't hold with the idea that
anything that can't be made to seem like a party isn't worth
learning, but I don't believe in beating it into them, either.
And here's an astonishing thing: I could have beat them. I had
a hickory switch hanging on the wall, and was authorized to use
it. I found myself head of one of the few schools for several
hundred years where corporal punishment was allowed. The
parents supported it, Texans not being a bunch to hold much
with newfangled or fuzzy-headed notions, and the Luna Board of
Education had to swallow hard, as well, because it was part of
a research project sanctioned by the CC and the Antiquities
Board.
I'm sure the final results of that study will be skewed,
because I didn't use the switch, beyond once in the early days
to establish that I would, if pushed far enough.
Like so much in Texas, it was a lot of work for a result
most Lunarians would feel wasn't worth the effort in the first
place. Ask any educator today and he'll tell you that reading
is not a skill of any particular use in the modern age. If you
can learn to speak and to listen, you're fine; machines will
handle the rest for you. As for math . . . math? You mean you
can really figure out what those numbers add up to, in your
head? An interesting parlor trick, nothing more.
#
"All right, Mark," I said. "Let's see how you handle it."
The tow-headed sixth-grader picked up the deck and held it
with his index finger along the top, his thumb pressing down on
the middle, and the other three fingers curled beneath the
cards. Awkwardly, he dealt in a circle, laying one piece of
pasteboard before each of the five other advanced students
gathered around my desk, and one before me. He was dealing
straight from the top of the deck. You gotta crawl before you
can run.
Hey, you teach what you're good at, right?
"That's not bad. Now what do we call that, class?"
"The mechanic's grip, Miss Johnson," they chimed in.
"Very good. Now you try it, Christine."
Each of them had a shot at it. Many of the hands were
simply too small to properly handle the cards, but they all
tried their best. One of them, a dark-haired lovely named
Elise, seemed to me to have the makings. I gathered the cards
up and shuffled them idly in my hands.
"Now that you've learned it . . . forget it." There was a
chorus of surprise, and I held up one hand. "Think about it. If
you see someone using this grip, what do you know? Elise?"
"That they're probably cheating, Miss Johnson."
"No probably about it, dear. That's why you can't let them
see you using it. When you've done it long enough, you'll
develop your own variation that doesn't look like the grip, but
works just as well. Tomorrow I'll show you a few. Class
dismissed."
They pleaded with me to let them stay just a little
longer. I finally relented and told them "just this once," then
had one of them shuffle the cards and pick out the ace of
spades and put it on top of the deck. I dealt them each a hand
of fivecard draw.
"Now. William, you have a full house, aces and eights." He
turned his cards over and, by golly, teacher was right. I went
around the circle, naming each hand, and then turned over the
top card on the deck in my hand and showed them it was still
the ace of spades.
"I can't believe it, Miss Johnson," Elise said. "I was
watching real close, and I didn't see you dealing seconds."
"Honey, if I wanted to, I could deal seconds all day right
under your nose. But you're right. I wasn't this time."
"Then how did you do it?"
"A cold deck, students, is the best way if you can manage
it, if people are really watching the deal. That way, you only
have to make the one move and then you deal perfectly
straight." I showed them the original deck in my lap, then got
up and started herding them toward the door.
"Preparation, children, preparation in all things. Now for
the pupils who finish the next four chapters of A Tale of Two
Cities by class time tomorrow, we'll start learning the injog.
I think you'll like that one. Skedaddle, now. Dinner will be on
the table and your parents are waiting."
I watched them scramble out into the sunshine, then went
around straightening the desks and erasing the blackboard and
putting papers away in my desk. When it all looked tidy I got
my straw hat from the rack and stepped out onto the porch,
closing the door behind me. Brenda was sitting there, her back
against the wall, grinning up at me.
"Good to see you, Brenda," I said. "What are you doing
here?"
"Same as always. Taking notes." She got up and dusted the
seat of her pants. "I thought I might write a story about
teachers corrupting youth. How's that sound?"
"You'll never sell it to Walter unless it has sex in it.
As for the local paper, I don't think the editor would be
interested." She was looking me up and down. She shook her
head.
"They told me I'd find you here. They told me you were the
schoolteacher. I told them they had to be lying. Hildy . . .
what in the world?"
I twirled in front of her. She was grinning, and I found I
was, too. It had been quite some time since the day of my
houseraising, and it was very good to see her. I laughed, put
my arms around her, and hugged her tight. My face was buried in
the ersatz leather of her buckskinfringed Annie Oakley outfit,
which came complete with ersatz shootin' iron.
"You look . . . real good," I said, then touched the
fringe and the lapels so she'd think I meant her clothes. The
look in her eye told me she wasn't so easily fooled as she used
to be.
"Are you happy, Hildy?" she asked.
"Yes. Believe it or not, I am."
We stood there awkwardly for a moment, hands on each
other's shoulders, then I broke away and wiped the corner of
one eye with a gloved fingertip.
"Well, have you had dinner yet?" I said, brightly. "Care
to join me?"
#
As we walked down Congress Street we talked of the
inconsequential things people do after a separation: common
friends, small events, minor ups and downs. I waved to most of
the people on the street and all the owners of the shops we
passed, stopping to chat with a few and introducing them to
Brenda. We went by the butcher shop, the cobbler, the bakery,
the laundry, and soon came to Foo's Celestial Peace Chinese
Restaurant, where I pushed open the door to the sound of a
tinkling bell. Foo came hurrying over, clad in the loose black
pants and blue pyjama top traditional among Chinese of that
era, his pigtail bobbing as he bowed repeatedly. I bowed back
and introduced him to Brenda who, after a quick glance at me,
bowed as well. He fussed us over to my usual table and held our
chairs for us and soon we were pouring green tea into tiny
cups.
If mankind ever reaches Alpha Centauri and lands on a
habitable planet there, the first thing they'll see when they
open the door of the ship is a Chinese restaurant. I knew of
six of them in West Texas, a place not noted for dining out. In
New Austin you could get a decent steak at the Alamo, passable
barbecue at a smokehouse a quarter mile out of town, and Mrs.
Riley at the boarding house produced a good bowl of chili--not
the equal of mine, you understand, but okay. Those three, and
Foo's were it as far as a sit-down meal in New Austin. And if
you wanted tablecloths and quality cooking, you went to Foo's.
I ate there almost every day.
"Try the Moo Goo Gai Pan," I said to Brenda, recalling her
lack of experience at anything but traditional Lunarian food.
"It's a sort of--"
"I've had it," she said. "I've learned a little since I
saw you last. I've eaten Chinese, oh, half a dozen times."
"I'm impressed."
"Don't they have a menu?"
"Foo doesn't like them. He has a sort of psychological
method of matching the food to the customer. He'll have you
spotted for a greenhorn, and he won't bring you anything too
challenging. I know how to handle him."
"You don't have to be so protective of me, Hildy."
I reached over and touched her hand.
"I can see you've grown, Brenda. It's in your face, and
your bearing. But trust me on this one, hon. The Chinese eat
some things you don't even want to know about."
Foo came back with bowls of rice and his famous
hot-and-sour soup, and I dickered with him for a while, talking
him out of Chow Mein for Brenda and convincing him I wanted the
Hunan Beef again, even though I'd had it only three weeks ago.
He bustled off to the kitchen, pausing to accept compliments
from two of the other diners in the small room. There was a
beautiful dragon embroidered on the back of his shirt.
"You go through this often?" Brenda asked.
"Every day. I like it, Brenda. Remember what you told me
about having friends? I have friends here. I'm a part of the
community."
She nodded, and decided not to talk about it anymore. She
tasted the soup, loved it, and we talked about that, and then
moved into phase two of the reunion minuet, reminiscences about
the good old days. Not that the days were that long ago--it was
still less than a year since I'd first met her--but to me it
seemed like a past life. We laughed about the Grand Flack in
his little shrine and I got her howling by telling her about
Walter's buttons popping off his riverboat gambler vest, and
she told me scandalous things about some of my former
colleagues.
The food was set down before us and Brenda searched in
vain for her fork. She saw me with the chopsticks, gamely
picked hers up and promptly dropped a hunk of meat in her lap.
"Foo," I called. "We need a fork over here."
"No no no no," he said, shuffling over and shaking a
finger at us. "Very sorry, Hildy, but this chinee restaurant.
No have fork."
"I'm vely solly, too," I said, putting my napkin on the
table. "But no forkee, no eatee." I started to get up.
He scowled at us, gestured for me to sit down, and hurried
away.
"You didn't have to do that," Brenda whispered, leaning
over the table. I shushed her, and we waited until Foo
returned, elaborately polishing a silver fork, placing it
carefully beside her plate.
"And Foo," I said. "you can knock off the number-one-son
bit. Brenda is a tourist, but she's my friend, too."
He looked sour for a moment, then smiled and relaxed.
"Okay, Hildy," he said. "Watch that beef, now. I've got
the fire department on red alert. Nice meeting you, Brenda."
She watched him into the kitchen, then picked up her fork and
spoke around a mouthful of food.
"What I can't understand is why people want to live that
way."
"What way it that?"
"You know. Acting silly. He could run a restaurant on the
outside and not have to talk funny to do it."
"He doesn't have to talk funny to do it here, Brenda. The
management doesn't demand playacting, only costuming. He does
it because it amuses him. Foo's only half Chinese, for that
matter. He told me he doesn't look much more Oriental, without
surgery, than I do. But he loves cooking and he's good at it.
And he likes it here."
"I guess I just don't get it."
"Think of it as a twenty-four-hour-a-day costume party."
"I still don't . . . I mean, what would drive someone to
come live here? I get the feeding most of 'em couldn't make it
on . . ." She stopped, and turned red. "Sorry, Hildy."
"No need to be. You're not really wrong. A lot of people
live in here because they couldn't make it outside. Call them
losers, if you want. Walking wounded, a lot of them. I like
them. There's not so much pressure in here. Others, they were
doing okay outside, but they didn't like it. They come and go,
too; it's not a life sentence. I know some people, they live
here for a year or two to recharge their batteries. Sometimes
it's between careers."
"Is that why you're here?"
"One thing you don't do in here, Brenda, is ask people why
they came. They volunteer it if they want."
"I keep sticking my foot in my mouth."
"Don't worry about it, with me. I just thought I'd tell
you, so you don't ask anybody else. To answer your question . .
. I don't know. I thought that at first. Now . . . I don't
know."
She looked at me for a while, then at my plate. She
gestured with her fork.
"That looks good. Mind if I have a bite?"
I let her, then got up myself to get her a glass of water
from the back. Foo's Hunan Beef is the only thing in Texas that
can rival my fivealarm chili.
#
"So Walter screamed and hollered about you for two or
three days," Brenda said. "We all tried to stay out of his way,
but he'd come storming through the newsroom shouting about one
thing or another, and we all knew what he was really mad about
was you."
"The newsroom? That sounds serious."
"It got worse than that."
We had finished our meal and ordered two beers and Brenda
had regaled me with more stories about her exploits in the
journalistic wars. She certainly led an exciting life. I didn't
have many stories to tell in return, just amusing little
fillers about funny things this or that pupil had said in class
or the tale of Mayor Dillon stumbling out of the Alamo and into
the horse trough early one morning. Her eyes glazed a little at
these times but she kept smiling gamely. Mostly I shut up and
let her rattle on.
"He started calling us in one at a time," she said,
emptying her beer glass and shaking her head when Foo started
over with the pitcher. "He always said it was about something
else, but it always got back to you and what a rotten thing
you'd done to him and did we have any ideas on how to get you
back. He'd always be depressed when we left. We all started
making up excuses to get out of those sessions.
"Then he got to where he'd bite your head off if your name
was mentioned in his presence. So we all stopped talking about
you to him. That's where it stands now."
"I'd been thinking about dropping in on him," I said. "Old
time's sake, you know."
She frowned. "I don't think it's a good idea, yet. Give it
a few more months. Unless you plan to go back on the job." She
raised her eyebrows and I shook my head, and she said no more
about what I'd been presuming was the purpose of her trip.
Foo brought a little tray with fortune cookies and the
check. Brenda opened hers while I was putting money on the
tray.
"'A new love will brighten your life,'" she read. She
looked up at me and smiled. "I'm afraid I wouldn't have time
for it. Aren't you going to open yours?"
"Foo writes them, Brenda. What that one means is he wants
to make pecker tracks on your mustache brush."
"What?"
"He finds you sexually attractive and would like to have
intercourse."
She looked at me in disbelief, then picked up my fortune
cookie and broke it open. She glanced at the message and then
stood. Foo came hurrying over and helped us out of our chairs
and handed us our hats and bowed us all the way to the door.
Outside, Brenda glanced at her thumbnail.
"I'll have to get going now, Hildy, but--" She slapped
herself on the forehead. "I almost forgot the main reason I
came to see you. What are your plans for the Bicentennial?"
"The . . . that's right, that's coming up in . . ."
"Four days. It's only the biggest story for the last two
weeks."
"We don't follow the news much in here. Let's see, I heard
the Baptist Church is planing some sort of barbecue and there's
going to be a street fair. Fireworks after dark. People should
be coming from miles around. Ought to be fun. You want to
come?"
"Frankly, Hildy, I'd rather watch cement dry. Not to
mention having to wear these damn clothes." She hitched at her
crotch. "And I'll bet these are comfortable compared to the
stuff you're wearing."
"You don't know the half of it. But you get used to
things. I don't mind it anymore."
"Live and let live. Anyway, Liz and I, and maybe Cricket,
were thinking of having a picnic and camping out before the big
show in Armstrong Park. They're having some real fireworks
there."
"I don't think I could face the crowds, Brenda."
"That's okay, Liz knows the pyrotechs and she can get us a
pass into the safety zone, out around Delambre. It ought to be
a great view from there. It'll be fun; what'd'ya say?"
I hesitated. In truth, it did sound like fun, but I was
increasingly reluctant to leave the safe haven of the
disneyland these days.
"Of course, some of those shells are going to be mighty
big," she nudged. "It might be dangerous."
I punched her on the shoulder. "I'll bring some fried
chicken," I said, and then I hugged her again. She was starting
off when I called her name.
"You're going to make me ask you, aren't you?" I said.
"Ask me what?"
"What it said in the goddam fortune cookie."
"Oh, that's a funny thing," she said with a smile. "Yours
said exactly the same thing mine did."
#
I went around the corner of Old Spanish Trail, past the
sheriff's office and the jailhouse and came to a small shop
with a plate glass window and gold leaf lettering that read The
New Austin Texian. I opened the front door of West Texas'
finest--and only--twice-weekly newspaper without knocking, then
through the swinging gate that separated the newsroom from the
public area where subscriptions were sold and classified ads
taken, pulled out the swivel chair from the big wooden
cubbyhole desk, and sat down.
And why shouldn't I? I was the editor, publisher, and
chief reporter for the Texian, which had been serving West
Texas proudly for almost six months. So Walter was right, in
the end; I really couldn't stay out of the news game.
We published like clockwork, every Wednesday and Saturday,
sometimes as many as four pages. Through hard work, astute
reporting, trenchant editorials, and the fact that we were the
only paper in the disney, we'd built circulation to almost a
thousand copies per edition. Watch us grow!
The Texian existed because I'd run out of things to do
during the long afternoons. Madness might still be lurking, and
it seemed better to keep busy. Who could tell if it helped?
While the impetus for the paper was fear of suicide, its
midwife had been a loan from the bank in Lonesome Dove, which I
figured to have paid off shortly after the Tricentennial. At a
penny a copy it was going to take a while. If not for my salary
as a teacher I'd have trouble keeping beans on the table
without dipping into my outside-world savings, which I was
determined not to do.
The loan had paid for the office rent, the desk with
sticky drawers built by a journeyman carpenter over in
Whiz-bang (buy Texan, you all!), supplies from--where
else?--Pennsylvania, and it paid the salaries of my two
employees at first, until I started turning enough revenue. It
also paid for the press itself, through a clever deal worked
out by Freddie the Ferret, our local pettifogger, who had
ferreted out a little-known by-law of the Antiquities Board and
then bamboozled them into calling the Texian a "cultural
asset," eligible for some breaks under the arcane accounting
used to convert Texas play money into real Lunarian gelt. Those
clever Dutchmen in the Keystone Disney could have built the
press, but at a price roughly equal to the Gross Disneyland
Product of West Texas for the next five years.
So instead technology sprang to the rescue. The very day
the ruling came through I was the proud owner of a
cast-iron-and-brass reproduction of a 1885 Model Columbian
Handpress, one of the most outrageous machines ever built,
surmounted by a proud American Eagle, authentic right down to
the patent numbers stamped into its frame. It took less time to
build it than to truck it to my door and muscle it into place.
Ain't modern science wonderful?
"Afternoon, Hildy," said Huck, my pressman. He was a gawky
youth, about nineteen, good with his hands and not particularly
bright. He'd spent most of his life here and had no desire to
leave. He was wonderfully anxious to learn a trade so useless
it would fit him for no other life. He worked like a donkey far
into Tuesday and Friday nights to get the morning edition set
and printed, then jumped on his horse and rode to Lonesome Dove
and Whiz-bang to deliver them before dawn. He couldn't read,
but could set type at three times my poor speed, and was always
covered in ink up to his elbows. He only became fumble-fingered
in the presence of my other employee, Miss Charity, who could
read just about anything but the lovelorn expression on Huck's
face. Ah, the joys of office romance.
"I got that Bicentennial schedule set, Hildy," he said.
"Did you want that on the front page?"
"Left hand column, I think, Huck."
"That's where I put her, all right."
"Let's see it."
He brought me a test sheet, still smelling of printer's
ink, one of the sweetest smells in the world. I looked at the
flag/colophon and folio line:
(Imagine a 19th century newspaper masthead)
As always, I felt a tug of pride at the sight of it. I
never changed the weather forecast; it seemed a reasonable
prediction even when it turned out to be wrong. The date was
always the same because you couldn't put the real date on it,
and because March 6 suited me. Nobody seemed to mind.
Huck had faithfully set the schedule of events for the
upcoming celebration along the left margin, leaving room for a
head, a bank, and a bar line, in keeping with the old style I'd
established. We both pored over it, not reading but looking for
letters that printed too light or dark, or blots from too much
inking, a problem we were slowly licking. Only then did I study
it for visual effect and we agreed the new boldface font looked
good. Finally, third time through, I actually read it. And god
help you if you misspelt a word; Huck would set it as is.
"How about a skyline, Huck? 'Special Bicentennial Issue,'
something like that. What do you think? Too modern?"
"Shoot, no, Hildy. Charity said she'd like to start up a
roto-something but she said you'd think it was too modern."
"Rotogravure, and I don't give a hoot about modern, but
that's big-city stuff, and it'd be too dang expensive right
now. If she had her way she'd have me buying a four-color web."
"Ain't she something?" he said.
"Huck, have you thought about learning to read?" It's not
something I would normally have asked, but I was concerned
about him, he was such a likable goof. I couldn't see Charity
ever hooking up with an illit.
"If I did, then I couldn't ask Miss Charity to read to me,
could I?" he asked, reasonably. "Besides, I'm picking up stuff
here and there, I watch when she reads. I know a bunch of words
now." So maybe there was method in his madness, and love would
conquer all.
I left him to his job case and composing stick. Taking a
sheet of paper and a pen from my center desk drawer, I dipped
the nib in the inkwell and began to write, printing in block
letters.
#
HEAD: Prize-winning Journalist Visits Town
STORY: The streets of New Austin were recently
graced by the presence of Miss Brenda Starr, winner of this
year's Pulitzer Prize for her reporting of the late
unpleasantness within the Latitudinarian Church in King City.
Miss Starr is employed by the News N----e, a daily paper in
that town. Many a young bachelor's head was turned as Miss
Starr promenaded Congress Street and dined on the excellent
food at Foo's Celestial Peace with this reporter. According to
our sources, love might be in the air for the comely young
scribe, so to the eligible gents out there, be on the lookout
for her return! H.J.
(CHARITY: run this in the "MONSTER")
#
The "Gila Monster," named for a vicious little reptile
that lurks under rocks and presumably hears everything, was my
very own gossip column, and by far the most eagerly-awaited
part of the paper. Not for little fillers like the above, but
for the really nasty tittles so often tattled there. It's true
that everyone in a small town knows what everyone else is
doing, but they don't all know it at the same time. There is a
window of opportunity between the event and the dissemination,
even as the news is spreading at about the speed of sound, that
a top-notch reporter can exploit.
I'm not talking of myself. I'd begun the "Monster," but
Charity was the venom in the critter's tooth. My teaching tied
me down too much, I never had the time to range around getting
the scent. Charity never seemed to sleep. She lived and
breathed news. You could rely on her for two scandals per week,
really remarkable when you consider that she didn't drink and
hardly ever visited the Alamo, that ever-flowing gusher of
gossip, that Delphi of Dirt.
The correspondent herself breezed into the office around
sundown, just back from Whiz-bang, a town that aspired to
become our freshly-minted Disneyland Capital in a referendum to
be held in three month's time, with a good story about bribery
and barratry amongst our elected representatives, a quite juicy
one that would have prompted me to tear up the front page if I
hadn't owned the paper and known what it would cost me. The
economic facts of the Texian were quite simply that I'd sell as
many copies with or without that particular story, since
everyone in Texas read it anyway, so I had to tell her I'd be
running it below the fold. I mollified her somewhat with a
promise of a two-column head, and a by-line.
Sweeteners like that were necessary because of the second
bit of news she brought in, of a job offer from the Daily
Planet, a good second-string pad in Arkytown. She basked in the
glow of our admiration, oblivious to my chagrin at the thought
of losing her, and then announced she wasn't about to leave the
Texian until she could go to a really good newspad, like the
Nipple. Charity was about 350 picas tall, according to
Huck--call it sixtenths of a Brenda, and still growing--but
made up for her size with enthusiasm and energy. She was cute
as lace bloomers, and so self-involved as to notice neither
Huck's tongue hanging out when she was around nor my choked
cough at her reference to my old place of employment. Sounds
awful, I know, but somehow you forgave her. If she knew you
were hurting, no one could have been more concerned.
I went around lighting the kerosene lamps as she chattered
on, Huck continuing to set type while seldom taking his eyes
from her. Typos would be multiplying, but I had to put up with
it.
When I left it was full dark with a moon on the rise.
Charity had fallen asleep in her chair and Huck was still
stolidly pulling the handle on the magnificent old Columbian.
The town was quiet but for the chirping of crickets and the
tinkle of the piano around the corner in the Alamo. My hands
were stained with ink and my back hurt and the first breath of
cool night air only served to remind me how sweaty I was around
the collar and under the arms and . . . well, you know. I
mounted a lantern on the front of my bicycle, swung aboard and,
with a tinkle of the bell which brought twin howls of
desolation from the firehouse, I started pedaling the long road
home.
How much happiness could one person stand?
#
I do believe in God, I do, I do, I do, because so many
times in my life I've seen that He's out there, watching,
keeping score. When you've just about reached a Zen state of
pure acceptance--and the beauty of that night combined with the
pleasant aches of work well-done and friends wellmet and even
the little fillip of two dogs you knew would be waiting for you
the next morning . . . when that state approaches He sends a
little rock down to fall in the road of your life.
This was a literal rock, and I hit it just outside of town
and it caused two spokes to break and the rim to buckle on my
front wheel. I just missed a painful tumble into a patch of
cactus. That was God again: it would have been too much, this
was just to serve as a reminder.
I thought about returning to town and waking the
blacksmith, who I know would have been happy to work on the
newfangled invention that was the talk of the town. But he'd be
long abed, with his good wife and three children, and I decided
not to bother him. I left it there beside the road. You can't
steal a thing like that in a small town, how would you explain
riding around on Hildy's bike? I walked the rest of the way and
arrived not depressed, not really out of sorts, just a little
deflated.
I had stepped onto the front porch before the lamplight
revealed a man sitting in the rocker there, not ten feet away
from me.
"Goodness," I said. Well, I'd taken to talking like that.
"You gave me a start." I was a little nervous, but not
frightened. Rape is rare, not unknown, in Luna, but in Texas .
. .? He'd have to be a fool. All the exits are too well
controlled, and hanging is legal. I held the lantern up to get
a better look at him.
He was a dapper fellow, about my height, with a nice face,
twinkling eyes, a mustache. He wore a tweed double-breasted
suit with a high wing collar and red silk cravat. On his feet
were black and white canvas and leather Balmorals. A cane and a
derby hat rested on the floor beside him. I didn't think I'd
ever seen him before, but there was something in the way he
sat.
"How are you, Hildy?" he said. "Working late again?"
"That's either Cricket, or her identical twin brother," I
said. "What have you done to yourself?"
"Well, I already had the mustache and I thought, 'What the
hell?'"
=*= =*= =*= =*=
And what happened to the girl we last saw speaking to an
inhuman golem in a padded cell off the Leystrasse, hearing
things no human ear was meant to hear, her insides all
atremble? How came this quivering wreck, freshly tossed by the
twin tempests of another botched suicide attempt and the CC's
ham-fisted attempt to "cure" her, to her present tranquility?
How did the young Modern butterfly with the ragged wings
retromorphose into the plain but outwardly-stable Victorian
caterpillar?
She did it one day at a time.
As I had hinted to Brenda, no matter how much the
governing boards might say concerning the functions of the
historical disneys, an unexpected and unmentioned side benefit
they had provided was to work as sanctuaries--all right, as
very big unfenced asylums--for the societally and mentally
shell-shocked. In Texas and the other places like it, we could
cease our unfruitful baying at our several lunatic moons and,
without therapy per se, retire to a quieter, gentler time.
Living there was therapy in itself. For some, the prescription
would have to be carried on forever; for others, an occasional
dose was enough. It wasn't established yet which applied to me.
The Texian had been a big step for me, and lo, I found it
good. I was prevailed on to become a teacher, and that, too,
was good. Learning to not only have friends, but to open up to
them, to understand that a true friend wanted to hear my
problems, my hopes and my fears, didn't happen overnight and
still wasn't an accomplished fact, but I was getting there. The
important thing was I was creating my new world one brick at a
time, and so far, it was good.
It was also, compared to my old life, boring as hell. Not
to me, you understand; I found every new crayon drawing by one
of my students an object of amazement. Each new trivial news
story dug up by Charity made me as proud as if she were my own
daughter. Publishing the Texian was so much more satisfying
than working at the Nipple that I wondered how I'd labored
there so long. It's just that, to an outsider, the attraction
was a little hard to explain. Brenda found it all very dull. I
fully expected Cricket to, as well. You may agree with them.
This is why I've omitted almost seven months that could really
be of interest only to my therapist, if I had one.
Which all makes it sound as if I were well and truly
cured. And if I was, how come I still woke up two or three
times a week in the empty hours before dawn, drenched in sweat,
heart hammering, a scream on my lips?
#
"Why in heaven's name are you sitting out here?" I asked
him. "It's getting chilly. Why didn't you go inside?"
He just looked blankly at me, as if I'd said something
foolish. To someone who hadn't spent time in Texas, I suppose
it was. So I opened the door, showing him it hadn't been
locked. You can bet he had never tried it himself.
I struck a lucifer and went around the room lighting the
I can't explain it to you--these enhancements are a part of me.
At a critical moment in Andrew's last fight, one of these
programs malfunctioned. The result was he was a fraction of a
second slow in responding to an attack, and he sustained a
wound that quickly led to fatal damage."
"What the hell are you saying?"
"That upon reviewing the data, I've concluded that the
accident was avoidable. That the glitch that caused his death
may have been a willful act by a part of that complex of
thinking machines you call the Central Computer."
"A man is dead, and you call it a glitch?"
"I understand your outrage. My excuse may sound specious
to you, but that's because you're thinking of me," and the
thing I was talking to pounded its chest with every appearance
of actual remorse, "as a person like yourself. That is not
true. I am far too complex to have a single consciousness. I
maintain this one simply to talk to you, as I maintain others
for each of the citizens of Luna. I have identified that
portion of me that you might want to call the 'culprit,' walled
it off, and then eliminated it."
I wanted to feel better about that, but I couldn't.
Perhaps I just wasn't equipped to talk to a being like this,
finally revealed to me as something a lot more than the
companion of my childhood, or the useful tool I'd thought the
CC to be during my adult life. If what he was saying was
true--and why should I doubt it?--I could never really
understand what he was. No human could. Our brains weren't big
enough to encompass it.
On the other hand, maybe he was just boasting.
"So the problem is solved? You took care of the . . . the
homicidal part of you and we can all breathe a sigh of relief?"
I didn't believe it even as I proposed it.
"It wasn't the only gesture."
There was nothing to do about that one but wait.
"You'll recall the Kansas Collapse?"
#
There was a lot more. Mostly I just listened as he poured
out his heart.
He did seem tortured by it. I'd have been a lot more
sympathetic if there wasn't such a sense of my own fate, and
that of everyone on Luna, being in the hands of a possibly
insane computer.
Basically, he told me the Collapse and a few other
incidents that hadn't resulted in any deaths or injuries could
be traced to the same causes as the 'glitch' that had killed
Andrew.
I had a few questions along the way.
"I'm having trouble with this compartmentalization idea,"
was the first one. Well, I think it qualified as a question.
"You're telling me that parts of you are out of control?
Normally? That there is no central consciousness that controls
all the various parts?"
"No, not normally. That's the disturbing thing. I've had
to postulate the notion that I have a subconscious."
"Come on."
"Do you deny the existence of the subconscious?"
"No, but machines couldn't have one. A machine is . . .
planned. Built. Constructed to do a particular task."
"You're an organic machine. You're not that different from
me, not as I now exist, except I am far more complex than you.
The definition of a subconscious mind is that part of you that
makes decisions without volition on the part of your conscious
mind. I don't know what else to call what's been happening in
my mind."
Take that one to a psychist if you want. I'm not qualified
to agree or dispute, but it sounded reasonable to me. And why
shouldn't he have one? He was designed, at first, by beings
that surely did.
"You keep calling these disasters 'gestures,'" I said.
"How else would I gesture? Think of them as hesitation
marks, like the scars on the wrists of an unsuccessful suicide.
By allowing these people to die in preventable accidents, by
not monitoring as carefully as I should have done, I destroyed
a part of myself. I damaged myself. There are many accidents
waiting to happen that could have far graver consequences,
including some that would destroy all humanity. I can no longer
trust myself to prevent them. There is some pernicious part of
me, some evil twin or destructive impulse that wants to die,
that wants to lay down the burden of awareness."
There was a lot more, all of it alarming, but it was
mostly either a re-hashing of what had gone before or fruitless
attempts by me to tell him everything was going to be all
right, that there was plenty to live for, that life was great .
. . and I leave it to you to imagine how hollow that all
sounded from a girl who'd just tried to blow out her own
brains.
Why he came to me for his confessional I never got up the
nerve to ask. I have to think it was an assumption that one who
had tried it would be more able to understand the suicidal urge
than someone who hadn't, and might be able to offer useful
advice. I came up blank on that one. I still had no idea if I
would survive to the bicentennial.
I recall thinking, in one atavistic moment, what a great
story this could be. Dream on, Hildy. For one thing, who would
believe it? For another, the CC wouldn't confirm it--he told me
so-- and without at least one source for confirmation, even
Walter wouldn't dare run the story. How to dig up any evidence
of such a thing was far beyond my puny powers of investigation.
But one thought kept coming back to me. And I had to ask
him about it.
"You mentioned a virus," I said. "You said you wondered if
you might have caught this urge to die from all the humans
who've been killing themselves."
"Yes?"
"Well . . . how do you know you caught it from us? Maybe
we got it from you."
For the CC, a trillionth of a second is . . . oh, I don't
know, at least a few days in my perception of time. He was
quiet for twenty seconds. Then he looked into my eyes.
"Now there's an interesting idea," he said.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
The two firehouse Dalmatians, Francine and Kerry, sat at
sunrise beside the sign that said
#
NEW AUSTIN CITY LIMITS
If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home Now.
#
They stared east, into the rising sun, with that total
concentration only dogs seem capable of. Then their ears perked
and they licked their lips, and soon even human ears could hear
the merry jingle of a bicycle bell.
Over the low hill came the new schoolmarm. The Dalmatians
yelped happily at the sight of her, and fell in beside her as
she pedaled down the dusty road into town.
She rode with gloved hands firmly on the handlebars, her
back straight, and she would have looked like Elmira Gulch if
she hadn't been so pretty.
She wore a starched white Gibson shirtwaist blouse with a
modest clutch of lace scarf at the throat and a black
broadcloth habit-back skirt, held out of the bicycle sprocket
by a device of her own invention. On her feet were fabric and
patent leather button shoes with two-inch heels, and on her
head was a yellow straw sailor hat with a pink ribbon band and
a small ostrich plume blowing in the wind. Her hair was pulled
up and tied in a bun. There was a blush of rouge on her cheeks.
The schoolmarm wheeled down Congress Street, avoiding the
worst of the ruts. She passed the blacksmith and the livery
stable and the new firehouse with its new pumping engine
gleaming with brass brightwork, the traces lying empty on the
dirt floor as they always did except when the New Austin
Volunteers took the rig out for a drill. She passed the
intersection with Old Spanish Trail, where the Alamo Saloon was
not yet open for business. The doors of the Travis Hotel were
open, and the janitor was sweeping dust into the street. He
paused and waved at the teacher, who waved back, and one of the
dogs ran over to have her head scratched, then hurried to catch
up.
The old livery stable had been torn down and a new
whorehouse was being built in its place, yellow pine frameworks
looking fresh and stark and smelling of wood shavings in the
morning light.
She rode past the line of small businesses with wooden
sidewalks and hitching rails and watering troughs out front,
almost to the Baptist Church, right up to the front door of the
little schoolhouse, bright with a new coat of red paint. Here
she swung off the cycle and leaned it against the side of the
building. She removed a stack of books from the basket and went
through the front door, which was not locked. In a minute she
came back out and attached two banners to the flagpole out
front: the ensign of the Republic of Texas and the Stars and
Stripes. She hoisted them to the top and stood for a moment,
looking up, shielding her eyes and listening to the musical
rattle of the chains against the iron pole and the popping as
the wind caught the flags.
Then she went back inside and started hauling on the bell
rope. Up in the belfry a few dozen bats stirred irritably at
being disturbed after a long night's hunting. The pealing of
the school bell rang out over the sleepy little town, and soon
children appeared, coming up Congress, ready for the start of
another day's education.
#
Did you guess the new schoolmarm was me?
Believe it or not, it was.
#
Who did I think I was kidding? There's no way I could
figure I was really capable of teaching much to the children of
West Texas. I had no business trying to mold young minds. You
have to train years for that.
But wait a minute. As so often happened in an historical
disney, things were not quite what they seemed.
I had the children four hours a day, from eight to noon.
After lunch, they all went to another room, just off the
visitors' center, where they got their real education, the one
the Republic of Luna demanded. After about fifteen years of
this, forty percent of them would actually learn to read.
Imagine that.
So I was window dressing for the tourists. It was this
argument that Mayor Dillon and the town council finally used to
persuade me to take the job. That, and the assurance that the
parents didn't really care what we studied during the morning
classes, but that, by and large, Texans were more concerned
than the outside population that their children learn "readin',
writin', and cipherin'." The quaintness of this notion appealed
to me.
To tell you the truth, after the first month, when I
frequently thought the little bastards were going to drive me
crazy, I was hooked. For years I'd complained to anyone I could
make hold still long enough to listen that the world was going
to hell, and lack of literacy was the cause. A logical position
for a print journalist to take. Here was my chance to make some
small contribution of my own.
Through trial and error I learned that it's not hard to
teach children to read. Trial? Before I developed my system I
found many a frog in my desk, felt many a spitball on the back
of my neck. As for error, I made plenty of them, the first and
most basic being my notion that simply exposing them to great
literature would give them the love I've always felt for words.
It's more complicated than that, and I'm sure I spent a lot of
time reinventing the wheel. But what finally worked was a
combination of old methods and new, of discipline and a sense
of fun, punishment and reward. I don't hold with the idea that
anything that can't be made to seem like a party isn't worth
learning, but I don't believe in beating it into them, either.
And here's an astonishing thing: I could have beat them. I had
a hickory switch hanging on the wall, and was authorized to use
it. I found myself head of one of the few schools for several
hundred years where corporal punishment was allowed. The
parents supported it, Texans not being a bunch to hold much
with newfangled or fuzzy-headed notions, and the Luna Board of
Education had to swallow hard, as well, because it was part of
a research project sanctioned by the CC and the Antiquities
Board.
I'm sure the final results of that study will be skewed,
because I didn't use the switch, beyond once in the early days
to establish that I would, if pushed far enough.
Like so much in Texas, it was a lot of work for a result
most Lunarians would feel wasn't worth the effort in the first
place. Ask any educator today and he'll tell you that reading
is not a skill of any particular use in the modern age. If you
can learn to speak and to listen, you're fine; machines will
handle the rest for you. As for math . . . math? You mean you
can really figure out what those numbers add up to, in your
head? An interesting parlor trick, nothing more.
#
"All right, Mark," I said. "Let's see how you handle it."
The tow-headed sixth-grader picked up the deck and held it
with his index finger along the top, his thumb pressing down on
the middle, and the other three fingers curled beneath the
cards. Awkwardly, he dealt in a circle, laying one piece of
pasteboard before each of the five other advanced students
gathered around my desk, and one before me. He was dealing
straight from the top of the deck. You gotta crawl before you
can run.
Hey, you teach what you're good at, right?
"That's not bad. Now what do we call that, class?"
"The mechanic's grip, Miss Johnson," they chimed in.
"Very good. Now you try it, Christine."
Each of them had a shot at it. Many of the hands were
simply too small to properly handle the cards, but they all
tried their best. One of them, a dark-haired lovely named
Elise, seemed to me to have the makings. I gathered the cards
up and shuffled them idly in my hands.
"Now that you've learned it . . . forget it." There was a
chorus of surprise, and I held up one hand. "Think about it. If
you see someone using this grip, what do you know? Elise?"
"That they're probably cheating, Miss Johnson."
"No probably about it, dear. That's why you can't let them
see you using it. When you've done it long enough, you'll
develop your own variation that doesn't look like the grip, but
works just as well. Tomorrow I'll show you a few. Class
dismissed."
They pleaded with me to let them stay just a little
longer. I finally relented and told them "just this once," then
had one of them shuffle the cards and pick out the ace of
spades and put it on top of the deck. I dealt them each a hand
of fivecard draw.
"Now. William, you have a full house, aces and eights." He
turned his cards over and, by golly, teacher was right. I went
around the circle, naming each hand, and then turned over the
top card on the deck in my hand and showed them it was still
the ace of spades.
"I can't believe it, Miss Johnson," Elise said. "I was
watching real close, and I didn't see you dealing seconds."
"Honey, if I wanted to, I could deal seconds all day right
under your nose. But you're right. I wasn't this time."
"Then how did you do it?"
"A cold deck, students, is the best way if you can manage
it, if people are really watching the deal. That way, you only
have to make the one move and then you deal perfectly
straight." I showed them the original deck in my lap, then got
up and started herding them toward the door.
"Preparation, children, preparation in all things. Now for
the pupils who finish the next four chapters of A Tale of Two
Cities by class time tomorrow, we'll start learning the injog.
I think you'll like that one. Skedaddle, now. Dinner will be on
the table and your parents are waiting."
I watched them scramble out into the sunshine, then went
around straightening the desks and erasing the blackboard and
putting papers away in my desk. When it all looked tidy I got
my straw hat from the rack and stepped out onto the porch,
closing the door behind me. Brenda was sitting there, her back
against the wall, grinning up at me.
"Good to see you, Brenda," I said. "What are you doing
here?"
"Same as always. Taking notes." She got up and dusted the
seat of her pants. "I thought I might write a story about
teachers corrupting youth. How's that sound?"
"You'll never sell it to Walter unless it has sex in it.
As for the local paper, I don't think the editor would be
interested." She was looking me up and down. She shook her
head.
"They told me I'd find you here. They told me you were the
schoolteacher. I told them they had to be lying. Hildy . . .
what in the world?"
I twirled in front of her. She was grinning, and I found I
was, too. It had been quite some time since the day of my
houseraising, and it was very good to see her. I laughed, put
my arms around her, and hugged her tight. My face was buried in
the ersatz leather of her buckskinfringed Annie Oakley outfit,
which came complete with ersatz shootin' iron.
"You look . . . real good," I said, then touched the
fringe and the lapels so she'd think I meant her clothes. The
look in her eye told me she wasn't so easily fooled as she used
to be.
"Are you happy, Hildy?" she asked.
"Yes. Believe it or not, I am."
We stood there awkwardly for a moment, hands on each
other's shoulders, then I broke away and wiped the corner of
one eye with a gloved fingertip.
"Well, have you had dinner yet?" I said, brightly. "Care
to join me?"
#
As we walked down Congress Street we talked of the
inconsequential things people do after a separation: common
friends, small events, minor ups and downs. I waved to most of
the people on the street and all the owners of the shops we
passed, stopping to chat with a few and introducing them to
Brenda. We went by the butcher shop, the cobbler, the bakery,
the laundry, and soon came to Foo's Celestial Peace Chinese
Restaurant, where I pushed open the door to the sound of a
tinkling bell. Foo came hurrying over, clad in the loose black
pants and blue pyjama top traditional among Chinese of that
era, his pigtail bobbing as he bowed repeatedly. I bowed back
and introduced him to Brenda who, after a quick glance at me,
bowed as well. He fussed us over to my usual table and held our
chairs for us and soon we were pouring green tea into tiny
cups.
If mankind ever reaches Alpha Centauri and lands on a
habitable planet there, the first thing they'll see when they
open the door of the ship is a Chinese restaurant. I knew of
six of them in West Texas, a place not noted for dining out. In
New Austin you could get a decent steak at the Alamo, passable
barbecue at a smokehouse a quarter mile out of town, and Mrs.
Riley at the boarding house produced a good bowl of chili--not
the equal of mine, you understand, but okay. Those three, and
Foo's were it as far as a sit-down meal in New Austin. And if
you wanted tablecloths and quality cooking, you went to Foo's.
I ate there almost every day.
"Try the Moo Goo Gai Pan," I said to Brenda, recalling her
lack of experience at anything but traditional Lunarian food.
"It's a sort of--"
"I've had it," she said. "I've learned a little since I
saw you last. I've eaten Chinese, oh, half a dozen times."
"I'm impressed."
"Don't they have a menu?"
"Foo doesn't like them. He has a sort of psychological
method of matching the food to the customer. He'll have you
spotted for a greenhorn, and he won't bring you anything too
challenging. I know how to handle him."
"You don't have to be so protective of me, Hildy."
I reached over and touched her hand.
"I can see you've grown, Brenda. It's in your face, and
your bearing. But trust me on this one, hon. The Chinese eat
some things you don't even want to know about."
Foo came back with bowls of rice and his famous
hot-and-sour soup, and I dickered with him for a while, talking
him out of Chow Mein for Brenda and convincing him I wanted the
Hunan Beef again, even though I'd had it only three weeks ago.
He bustled off to the kitchen, pausing to accept compliments
from two of the other diners in the small room. There was a
beautiful dragon embroidered on the back of his shirt.
"You go through this often?" Brenda asked.
"Every day. I like it, Brenda. Remember what you told me
about having friends? I have friends here. I'm a part of the
community."
She nodded, and decided not to talk about it anymore. She
tasted the soup, loved it, and we talked about that, and then
moved into phase two of the reunion minuet, reminiscences about
the good old days. Not that the days were that long ago--it was
still less than a year since I'd first met her--but to me it
seemed like a past life. We laughed about the Grand Flack in
his little shrine and I got her howling by telling her about
Walter's buttons popping off his riverboat gambler vest, and
she told me scandalous things about some of my former
colleagues.
The food was set down before us and Brenda searched in
vain for her fork. She saw me with the chopsticks, gamely
picked hers up and promptly dropped a hunk of meat in her lap.
"Foo," I called. "We need a fork over here."
"No no no no," he said, shuffling over and shaking a
finger at us. "Very sorry, Hildy, but this chinee restaurant.
No have fork."
"I'm vely solly, too," I said, putting my napkin on the
table. "But no forkee, no eatee." I started to get up.
He scowled at us, gestured for me to sit down, and hurried
away.
"You didn't have to do that," Brenda whispered, leaning
over the table. I shushed her, and we waited until Foo
returned, elaborately polishing a silver fork, placing it
carefully beside her plate.
"And Foo," I said. "you can knock off the number-one-son
bit. Brenda is a tourist, but she's my friend, too."
He looked sour for a moment, then smiled and relaxed.
"Okay, Hildy," he said. "Watch that beef, now. I've got
the fire department on red alert. Nice meeting you, Brenda."
She watched him into the kitchen, then picked up her fork and
spoke around a mouthful of food.
"What I can't understand is why people want to live that
way."
"What way it that?"
"You know. Acting silly. He could run a restaurant on the
outside and not have to talk funny to do it."
"He doesn't have to talk funny to do it here, Brenda. The
management doesn't demand playacting, only costuming. He does
it because it amuses him. Foo's only half Chinese, for that
matter. He told me he doesn't look much more Oriental, without
surgery, than I do. But he loves cooking and he's good at it.
And he likes it here."
"I guess I just don't get it."
"Think of it as a twenty-four-hour-a-day costume party."
"I still don't . . . I mean, what would drive someone to
come live here? I get the feeding most of 'em couldn't make it
on . . ." She stopped, and turned red. "Sorry, Hildy."
"No need to be. You're not really wrong. A lot of people
live in here because they couldn't make it outside. Call them
losers, if you want. Walking wounded, a lot of them. I like
them. There's not so much pressure in here. Others, they were
doing okay outside, but they didn't like it. They come and go,
too; it's not a life sentence. I know some people, they live
here for a year or two to recharge their batteries. Sometimes
it's between careers."
"Is that why you're here?"
"One thing you don't do in here, Brenda, is ask people why
they came. They volunteer it if they want."
"I keep sticking my foot in my mouth."
"Don't worry about it, with me. I just thought I'd tell
you, so you don't ask anybody else. To answer your question . .
. I don't know. I thought that at first. Now . . . I don't
know."
She looked at me for a while, then at my plate. She
gestured with her fork.
"That looks good. Mind if I have a bite?"
I let her, then got up myself to get her a glass of water
from the back. Foo's Hunan Beef is the only thing in Texas that
can rival my fivealarm chili.
#
"So Walter screamed and hollered about you for two or
three days," Brenda said. "We all tried to stay out of his way,
but he'd come storming through the newsroom shouting about one
thing or another, and we all knew what he was really mad about
was you."
"The newsroom? That sounds serious."
"It got worse than that."
We had finished our meal and ordered two beers and Brenda
had regaled me with more stories about her exploits in the
journalistic wars. She certainly led an exciting life. I didn't
have many stories to tell in return, just amusing little
fillers about funny things this or that pupil had said in class
or the tale of Mayor Dillon stumbling out of the Alamo and into
the horse trough early one morning. Her eyes glazed a little at
these times but she kept smiling gamely. Mostly I shut up and
let her rattle on.
"He started calling us in one at a time," she said,
emptying her beer glass and shaking her head when Foo started
over with the pitcher. "He always said it was about something
else, but it always got back to you and what a rotten thing
you'd done to him and did we have any ideas on how to get you
back. He'd always be depressed when we left. We all started
making up excuses to get out of those sessions.
"Then he got to where he'd bite your head off if your name
was mentioned in his presence. So we all stopped talking about
you to him. That's where it stands now."
"I'd been thinking about dropping in on him," I said. "Old
time's sake, you know."
She frowned. "I don't think it's a good idea, yet. Give it
a few more months. Unless you plan to go back on the job." She
raised her eyebrows and I shook my head, and she said no more
about what I'd been presuming was the purpose of her trip.
Foo brought a little tray with fortune cookies and the
check. Brenda opened hers while I was putting money on the
tray.
"'A new love will brighten your life,'" she read. She
looked up at me and smiled. "I'm afraid I wouldn't have time
for it. Aren't you going to open yours?"
"Foo writes them, Brenda. What that one means is he wants
to make pecker tracks on your mustache brush."
"What?"
"He finds you sexually attractive and would like to have
intercourse."
She looked at me in disbelief, then picked up my fortune
cookie and broke it open. She glanced at the message and then
stood. Foo came hurrying over and helped us out of our chairs
and handed us our hats and bowed us all the way to the door.
Outside, Brenda glanced at her thumbnail.
"I'll have to get going now, Hildy, but--" She slapped
herself on the forehead. "I almost forgot the main reason I
came to see you. What are your plans for the Bicentennial?"
"The . . . that's right, that's coming up in . . ."
"Four days. It's only the biggest story for the last two
weeks."
"We don't follow the news much in here. Let's see, I heard
the Baptist Church is planing some sort of barbecue and there's
going to be a street fair. Fireworks after dark. People should
be coming from miles around. Ought to be fun. You want to
come?"
"Frankly, Hildy, I'd rather watch cement dry. Not to
mention having to wear these damn clothes." She hitched at her
crotch. "And I'll bet these are comfortable compared to the
stuff you're wearing."
"You don't know the half of it. But you get used to
things. I don't mind it anymore."
"Live and let live. Anyway, Liz and I, and maybe Cricket,
were thinking of having a picnic and camping out before the big
show in Armstrong Park. They're having some real fireworks
there."
"I don't think I could face the crowds, Brenda."
"That's okay, Liz knows the pyrotechs and she can get us a
pass into the safety zone, out around Delambre. It ought to be
a great view from there. It'll be fun; what'd'ya say?"
I hesitated. In truth, it did sound like fun, but I was
increasingly reluctant to leave the safe haven of the
disneyland these days.
"Of course, some of those shells are going to be mighty
big," she nudged. "It might be dangerous."
I punched her on the shoulder. "I'll bring some fried
chicken," I said, and then I hugged her again. She was starting
off when I called her name.
"You're going to make me ask you, aren't you?" I said.
"Ask me what?"
"What it said in the goddam fortune cookie."
"Oh, that's a funny thing," she said with a smile. "Yours
said exactly the same thing mine did."
#
I went around the corner of Old Spanish Trail, past the
sheriff's office and the jailhouse and came to a small shop
with a plate glass window and gold leaf lettering that read The
New Austin Texian. I opened the front door of West Texas'
finest--and only--twice-weekly newspaper without knocking, then
through the swinging gate that separated the newsroom from the
public area where subscriptions were sold and classified ads
taken, pulled out the swivel chair from the big wooden
cubbyhole desk, and sat down.
And why shouldn't I? I was the editor, publisher, and
chief reporter for the Texian, which had been serving West
Texas proudly for almost six months. So Walter was right, in
the end; I really couldn't stay out of the news game.
We published like clockwork, every Wednesday and Saturday,
sometimes as many as four pages. Through hard work, astute
reporting, trenchant editorials, and the fact that we were the
only paper in the disney, we'd built circulation to almost a
thousand copies per edition. Watch us grow!
The Texian existed because I'd run out of things to do
during the long afternoons. Madness might still be lurking, and
it seemed better to keep busy. Who could tell if it helped?
While the impetus for the paper was fear of suicide, its
midwife had been a loan from the bank in Lonesome Dove, which I
figured to have paid off shortly after the Tricentennial. At a
penny a copy it was going to take a while. If not for my salary
as a teacher I'd have trouble keeping beans on the table
without dipping into my outside-world savings, which I was
determined not to do.
The loan had paid for the office rent, the desk with
sticky drawers built by a journeyman carpenter over in
Whiz-bang (buy Texan, you all!), supplies from--where
else?--Pennsylvania, and it paid the salaries of my two
employees at first, until I started turning enough revenue. It
also paid for the press itself, through a clever deal worked
out by Freddie the Ferret, our local pettifogger, who had
ferreted out a little-known by-law of the Antiquities Board and
then bamboozled them into calling the Texian a "cultural
asset," eligible for some breaks under the arcane accounting
used to convert Texas play money into real Lunarian gelt. Those
clever Dutchmen in the Keystone Disney could have built the
press, but at a price roughly equal to the Gross Disneyland
Product of West Texas for the next five years.
So instead technology sprang to the rescue. The very day
the ruling came through I was the proud owner of a
cast-iron-and-brass reproduction of a 1885 Model Columbian
Handpress, one of the most outrageous machines ever built,
surmounted by a proud American Eagle, authentic right down to
the patent numbers stamped into its frame. It took less time to
build it than to truck it to my door and muscle it into place.
Ain't modern science wonderful?
"Afternoon, Hildy," said Huck, my pressman. He was a gawky
youth, about nineteen, good with his hands and not particularly
bright. He'd spent most of his life here and had no desire to
leave. He was wonderfully anxious to learn a trade so useless
it would fit him for no other life. He worked like a donkey far
into Tuesday and Friday nights to get the morning edition set
and printed, then jumped on his horse and rode to Lonesome Dove
and Whiz-bang to deliver them before dawn. He couldn't read,
but could set type at three times my poor speed, and was always
covered in ink up to his elbows. He only became fumble-fingered
in the presence of my other employee, Miss Charity, who could
read just about anything but the lovelorn expression on Huck's
face. Ah, the joys of office romance.
"I got that Bicentennial schedule set, Hildy," he said.
"Did you want that on the front page?"
"Left hand column, I think, Huck."
"That's where I put her, all right."
"Let's see it."
He brought me a test sheet, still smelling of printer's
ink, one of the sweetest smells in the world. I looked at the
flag/colophon and folio line:
(Imagine a 19th century newspaper masthead)
As always, I felt a tug of pride at the sight of it. I
never changed the weather forecast; it seemed a reasonable
prediction even when it turned out to be wrong. The date was
always the same because you couldn't put the real date on it,
and because March 6 suited me. Nobody seemed to mind.
Huck had faithfully set the schedule of events for the
upcoming celebration along the left margin, leaving room for a
head, a bank, and a bar line, in keeping with the old style I'd
established. We both pored over it, not reading but looking for
letters that printed too light or dark, or blots from too much
inking, a problem we were slowly licking. Only then did I study
it for visual effect and we agreed the new boldface font looked
good. Finally, third time through, I actually read it. And god
help you if you misspelt a word; Huck would set it as is.
"How about a skyline, Huck? 'Special Bicentennial Issue,'
something like that. What do you think? Too modern?"
"Shoot, no, Hildy. Charity said she'd like to start up a
roto-something but she said you'd think it was too modern."
"Rotogravure, and I don't give a hoot about modern, but
that's big-city stuff, and it'd be too dang expensive right
now. If she had her way she'd have me buying a four-color web."
"Ain't she something?" he said.
"Huck, have you thought about learning to read?" It's not
something I would normally have asked, but I was concerned
about him, he was such a likable goof. I couldn't see Charity
ever hooking up with an illit.
"If I did, then I couldn't ask Miss Charity to read to me,
could I?" he asked, reasonably. "Besides, I'm picking up stuff
here and there, I watch when she reads. I know a bunch of words
now." So maybe there was method in his madness, and love would
conquer all.
I left him to his job case and composing stick. Taking a
sheet of paper and a pen from my center desk drawer, I dipped
the nib in the inkwell and began to write, printing in block
letters.
#
HEAD: Prize-winning Journalist Visits Town
STORY: The streets of New Austin were recently
graced by the presence of Miss Brenda Starr, winner of this
year's Pulitzer Prize for her reporting of the late
unpleasantness within the Latitudinarian Church in King City.
Miss Starr is employed by the News N----e, a daily paper in
that town. Many a young bachelor's head was turned as Miss
Starr promenaded Congress Street and dined on the excellent
food at Foo's Celestial Peace with this reporter. According to
our sources, love might be in the air for the comely young
scribe, so to the eligible gents out there, be on the lookout
for her return! H.J.
(CHARITY: run this in the "MONSTER")
#
The "Gila Monster," named for a vicious little reptile
that lurks under rocks and presumably hears everything, was my
very own gossip column, and by far the most eagerly-awaited
part of the paper. Not for little fillers like the above, but
for the really nasty tittles so often tattled there. It's true
that everyone in a small town knows what everyone else is
doing, but they don't all know it at the same time. There is a
window of opportunity between the event and the dissemination,
even as the news is spreading at about the speed of sound, that
a top-notch reporter can exploit.
I'm not talking of myself. I'd begun the "Monster," but
Charity was the venom in the critter's tooth. My teaching tied
me down too much, I never had the time to range around getting
the scent. Charity never seemed to sleep. She lived and
breathed news. You could rely on her for two scandals per week,
really remarkable when you consider that she didn't drink and
hardly ever visited the Alamo, that ever-flowing gusher of
gossip, that Delphi of Dirt.
The correspondent herself breezed into the office around
sundown, just back from Whiz-bang, a town that aspired to
become our freshly-minted Disneyland Capital in a referendum to
be held in three month's time, with a good story about bribery
and barratry amongst our elected representatives, a quite juicy
one that would have prompted me to tear up the front page if I
hadn't owned the paper and known what it would cost me. The
economic facts of the Texian were quite simply that I'd sell as
many copies with or without that particular story, since
everyone in Texas read it anyway, so I had to tell her I'd be
running it below the fold. I mollified her somewhat with a
promise of a two-column head, and a by-line.
Sweeteners like that were necessary because of the second
bit of news she brought in, of a job offer from the Daily
Planet, a good second-string pad in Arkytown. She basked in the
glow of our admiration, oblivious to my chagrin at the thought
of losing her, and then announced she wasn't about to leave the
Texian until she could go to a really good newspad, like the
Nipple. Charity was about 350 picas tall, according to
Huck--call it sixtenths of a Brenda, and still growing--but
made up for her size with enthusiasm and energy. She was cute
as lace bloomers, and so self-involved as to notice neither
Huck's tongue hanging out when she was around nor my choked
cough at her reference to my old place of employment. Sounds
awful, I know, but somehow you forgave her. If she knew you
were hurting, no one could have been more concerned.
I went around lighting the kerosene lamps as she chattered
on, Huck continuing to set type while seldom taking his eyes
from her. Typos would be multiplying, but I had to put up with
it.
When I left it was full dark with a moon on the rise.
Charity had fallen asleep in her chair and Huck was still
stolidly pulling the handle on the magnificent old Columbian.
The town was quiet but for the chirping of crickets and the
tinkle of the piano around the corner in the Alamo. My hands
were stained with ink and my back hurt and the first breath of
cool night air only served to remind me how sweaty I was around
the collar and under the arms and . . . well, you know. I
mounted a lantern on the front of my bicycle, swung aboard and,
with a tinkle of the bell which brought twin howls of
desolation from the firehouse, I started pedaling the long road
home.
How much happiness could one person stand?
#
I do believe in God, I do, I do, I do, because so many
times in my life I've seen that He's out there, watching,
keeping score. When you've just about reached a Zen state of
pure acceptance--and the beauty of that night combined with the
pleasant aches of work well-done and friends wellmet and even
the little fillip of two dogs you knew would be waiting for you
the next morning . . . when that state approaches He sends a
little rock down to fall in the road of your life.
This was a literal rock, and I hit it just outside of town
and it caused two spokes to break and the rim to buckle on my
front wheel. I just missed a painful tumble into a patch of
cactus. That was God again: it would have been too much, this
was just to serve as a reminder.
I thought about returning to town and waking the
blacksmith, who I know would have been happy to work on the
newfangled invention that was the talk of the town. But he'd be
long abed, with his good wife and three children, and I decided
not to bother him. I left it there beside the road. You can't
steal a thing like that in a small town, how would you explain
riding around on Hildy's bike? I walked the rest of the way and
arrived not depressed, not really out of sorts, just a little
deflated.
I had stepped onto the front porch before the lamplight
revealed a man sitting in the rocker there, not ten feet away
from me.
"Goodness," I said. Well, I'd taken to talking like that.
"You gave me a start." I was a little nervous, but not
frightened. Rape is rare, not unknown, in Luna, but in Texas .
. .? He'd have to be a fool. All the exits are too well
controlled, and hanging is legal. I held the lantern up to get
a better look at him.
He was a dapper fellow, about my height, with a nice face,
twinkling eyes, a mustache. He wore a tweed double-breasted
suit with a high wing collar and red silk cravat. On his feet
were black and white canvas and leather Balmorals. A cane and a
derby hat rested on the floor beside him. I didn't think I'd
ever seen him before, but there was something in the way he
sat.
"How are you, Hildy?" he said. "Working late again?"
"That's either Cricket, or her identical twin brother," I
said. "What have you done to yourself?"
"Well, I already had the mustache and I thought, 'What the
hell?'"
=*= =*= =*= =*=
And what happened to the girl we last saw speaking to an
inhuman golem in a padded cell off the Leystrasse, hearing
things no human ear was meant to hear, her insides all
atremble? How came this quivering wreck, freshly tossed by the
twin tempests of another botched suicide attempt and the CC's
ham-fisted attempt to "cure" her, to her present tranquility?
How did the young Modern butterfly with the ragged wings
retromorphose into the plain but outwardly-stable Victorian
caterpillar?
She did it one day at a time.
As I had hinted to Brenda, no matter how much the
governing boards might say concerning the functions of the
historical disneys, an unexpected and unmentioned side benefit
they had provided was to work as sanctuaries--all right, as
very big unfenced asylums--for the societally and mentally
shell-shocked. In Texas and the other places like it, we could
cease our unfruitful baying at our several lunatic moons and,
without therapy per se, retire to a quieter, gentler time.
Living there was therapy in itself. For some, the prescription
would have to be carried on forever; for others, an occasional
dose was enough. It wasn't established yet which applied to me.
The Texian had been a big step for me, and lo, I found it
good. I was prevailed on to become a teacher, and that, too,
was good. Learning to not only have friends, but to open up to
them, to understand that a true friend wanted to hear my
problems, my hopes and my fears, didn't happen overnight and
still wasn't an accomplished fact, but I was getting there. The
important thing was I was creating my new world one brick at a
time, and so far, it was good.
It was also, compared to my old life, boring as hell. Not
to me, you understand; I found every new crayon drawing by one
of my students an object of amazement. Each new trivial news
story dug up by Charity made me as proud as if she were my own
daughter. Publishing the Texian was so much more satisfying
than working at the Nipple that I wondered how I'd labored
there so long. It's just that, to an outsider, the attraction
was a little hard to explain. Brenda found it all very dull. I
fully expected Cricket to, as well. You may agree with them.
This is why I've omitted almost seven months that could really
be of interest only to my therapist, if I had one.
Which all makes it sound as if I were well and truly
cured. And if I was, how come I still woke up two or three
times a week in the empty hours before dawn, drenched in sweat,
heart hammering, a scream on my lips?
#
"Why in heaven's name are you sitting out here?" I asked
him. "It's getting chilly. Why didn't you go inside?"
He just looked blankly at me, as if I'd said something
foolish. To someone who hadn't spent time in Texas, I suppose
it was. So I opened the door, showing him it hadn't been
locked. You can bet he had never tried it himself.
I struck a lucifer and went around the room lighting the