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surveys. It published thousands of times more words per hour,
and included most of our political coverage.
Somewhere between those two was the electronic equivalent
of the Sunday supplement, published weekly, called Sundae.
"Here's what I want," Walter went on. "You'll go out and
cover your regular beats. But I want you to be thinking Sundae
while you do that. Whatever you're covering, think about how it
would have been different two hundred years ago, back on Earth.
It can be anything at all. Like today, sex. There's a topic for
you. Write about what sex was like back on Earth, and contrast
it to what it's like now. You could even throw in stuff about
what people think it's gonna be like in another twenty years,
or a century."
"Walter, I don't deserve this."
"Hildy, you're the only man for it. I want one article per
week for the entire year leading up to the bicentennial. I'm
giving you a free hand as to what they're about. You can
editorialize. You can personalize, make it like a column.
You've always wanted a column; here's your chance at a byline.
You want expensive consultants, advisors, research? You name
it, you got it. You need to travel? I'm good for the money. I
want only the best for this series."
I didn't know what to say to that. It was a good offer.
Nothing in life is ever exactly what you asked for, but I had
wanted a column, and this seemed like a reasonable shot at it.
"Hildy, during the twentieth century there was a time like
no other time humans have seen before or since. My
grandfather's great-grandfather was born in the year the Wright
brothers made the first powered flight. By the time he died,
there was a permanent base on Luna. My grandfather was ten when
the old man died, and he's told me many times how he used to
talk about the old days. It was amazing just how much change
that old man had seen in his lifetime.
"In that century they started talking about a 'generation
gap.' So much happened, so many things changed so fast, how was
a seventy-year-old supposed to talk to a fifteen-year-old in
terms they both could understand?
"Well, things don't change quite that fast anymore. I
wonder if they ever will again? But we've got something in
common with those people. We've got kids like Brenda here who
hardly remember anything beyond last year, and they're living
side by side with people who were born and grew up on the
Earth. People who remember what a one-gee gravity field was
like, what it was to walk around outside and breathe free,
un-metered air. Who were raised when people were born, grew up,
and died in the same sex. People who fought in wars. Our oldest
citizens are almost three hundred now. Surely there's fifty-two
stories in that.
"This is a story that's been waiting two hundred years to
be told. We've had our heads in the sand. We've been beaten,
humiliated, suffered a racial set-back that I'm afraid . . . "
It was as if he suddenly had heard what he was saying. He
sputtered to a stop, not looking me in the eye.
I was not used to speeches from Walter. It made me uneasy.
The assignment made me uneasy. I don't think about the Invasion
much--which was precisely his point, of course--and I think
that's just as well. But I could see his passion, and knew I'd
better not fight it. I was used to rage, to being chewed out
for this or that. Being appealed to was something brand new. I
felt it was time to lighten the atmosphere a little.
"So how big a raise are we talking about here?" I asked.
He settled back in his chair and smiled, back on familiar
ground.
"You know I never discuss that. It'll be in your next
paycheck. If you don't like it, gripe to me then."
"And I have to use the kid on all this stuff?"
"Hey! I'm right here," Brenda protested.
"The kid is vital to the whole thing. She's your sounding
board. If a fact from the old days sounds weird to her, you
know you're onto something. She's contemporary as your last
breath, she's eager to learn and fairly bright, and she knows
nothing. You'll be the middle man. You're about the right age
for it, and history's your hobby. You know more about old Earth
than any man your age I've ever met."
"If I'm in the middle . . . "
"You might want to interview my grandfather," Walter
suggested. "But there'll be a third member of your team.
Somebody Earth-born. I haven't decided yet who that'll be.
"Now get out of here, both of you."
I could see Brenda had a thousand questions she still
wanted to ask. I warned her off with my eyes, and followed her
to the door.
"And Hildy," Walter said. I looked back.
"If you put words like abnegation and infibulation in
these stories, I'll personally caponize you."
=*= =*= =*= =*=
I pulled the tarp off my pile of precious lumber and
watched the scorpions scuttle away in the sunlight. Say what
you want about the sanctity of life; I like to crush 'em.
Deeper in the pile I'd disturbed a rattlesnake. I didn't
see him, but could hear him warning me away. Handling them from
the ends, I selected a plank and pulled it out. I shouldered it
and carried it to my half-finished cabin. It was evening, the
best time to work in West Texas. The temperature had dropped to
ninety-five in the oldstyle scale they used there. During the
day it had been well over a hundred.
I positioned the plank on two sawhorses near what would be
the front porch when I was finished. I squatted and looked down
its length. This was a one-by-ten--inches, not
centimeters--which meant it actually measured about nine by
seven eighths, for reasons no one had ever explained to me.
Thinking in inches was difficult enough, without dealing in
those odd ratios called fractions. What was wrong with
decimals, and what was wrong with a one-by-ten actually being
one inch by ten inches? Why twelve inches in a foot? Maybe
there was a story in it for the bicentennial series.
The plank had been advertised as ten feet long, and that
measurement was accurate. It was also supposed to be straight,
but if it was they had used a noodle for a straightedge.
Texas was the second of what was to be three disneylands
devoted to the eighteenth century. Out here west of the Pecos
we reckoned it to be 1845, the last year of the Texas Republic,
though you could use technology as recent as 1899 without
running afoul of the anachronism regulations. Pennsylvania had
been the first of the triad, and my plank, complete with two
big bulges in the width and a depressing sag when held by one
end, had been milled there by "Amish" sawyers using the old
methods. A little oval stamp in a corner guaranteed this:
"Approved, Lunar Antiquities Reproduction Board." Either the
methods of the 1800's couldn't reliably produce straight and
true lumber, or those damn Dutchmen were still learning their
craft.
So I did what the carpenters of the Texas Republic had
done. I got out my plane (also certified by the L.A.R.B.),
removed the primitive blade, sharpened it against a home-made
whetstone, re-attached the blade, and began shaving away the
irregularities.
I'm not complaining. I was lucky to get the lumber. Most
of the cabin was made of rough-hewn logs notched together at
the ends, chinked with adobe.
The board had turned gray in the heat and sun, but after a
few strokes I was down to the yellow pine interior. The wood
curled up around the blade and the chips dropped around my bare
feet. It smelled fresh and new and I found myself smiling as
the sweat dripped off my nose. It would be good to be a
carpenter, I thought. Maybe I'd quit the newspaper business.
Then the blade broke and jammed into the wood. My palm
slipped off the knob in front and tried to skate across the
fresh-planed surface, driving long splinters into my skin. The
plane clattered off the board and went for my toe with the
hellish accuracy of a pain-guided missile.
I shouted a few words rarely heard in 1845, and some
uncommon even in the 23rd century. I hopped around on one foot.
Another lost art, hopping.
"It could have been worse," a voice said in my ear. It was
either incipient schizophrenia, or the Central Computer. I bet
on the CC.
"How? By hitting both feet?"
"Gravity. Consider the momentum such a massive object
could have attained, had this really been West Texas, which
lies at the bottom of a spacetime depression twenty-five
thousand miles per hour deep."
Definitely the CC.
I examined my hand. Blood was oozing from it, running down
my forearm and dripping from the elbow. But there was no
arterial pumping. The foot, though it still hurt like fire, was
not damaged.
"You see now why laborers in 1845 wore work boots."
"Is that why you called, CC? To give me a lecture about
safety in the work place?"
"No. I was going to announce a visitor. The colorful
language lesson was an unexpected bonus of my tuning in on--"
"Shut up, will you?"
The Central Computer did so.
The end of a splinter protruded from my palm, so I pulled
on it. I got some, but a lot was still buried in there. Others
had broken off below skin level. All in all, a wonderful day's
work.
A visitor? I looked around and saw no one, though a whole
tribe of Apaches could have been hiding in the clumps of
mesquite. I had not expected to see any sign of the CC. It uses
the circuitry in my own head to produce its voice.
And it wasn't supposed to manifest itself in Texas. As is
often the case, there was more to the CC than it was telling.
"CC, on-line, please."
"I hear and obey."
"Who's the visitor?"
"Tall, young, ignorant of tampons, with a certain
puppy-like charm--"
"Oh, Jesus."
"I know I'm not supposed to intrude on these antique
environments, but she was quite insistent on learning your
location, and I thought it better for you to have some
forewarning than to--"
"Okay. Now shut up."
I sat in the rickety chair which had been my first
carpentry project. Being careful of the injured hand, I pulled
on the work boots I should have been wearing all along. The
reason I hadn't was simple: I hated them.
There was another story for Walter. Shoes. If Lunarians
wear them, they tend to be the soft kind, like moccasins, or
socks. Reason: in a crowded urban environment of perfectly
smooth floors and carpets and a majority of bare-foot people,
hard shoes are anti-social. You could break someone else's
toes.
Once I had my feet jammed into the smelly things I had to
search for the buttonhook. Buttons, on shoes! It was
outrageous. How had people ever tolerated such things? To add
insult to inutility, the damn things had cost me a fortune.
I stood and was about to head into town when the CC spoke
again.
"If you leave those tools out and it rains, they will
combine with the oxygen in the air in a slow combustion
reaction."
"Rust is too poor a word for you, right? It rains out here
. . . what? Once every hundred days?"
But my heart wasn't in it. The CC was right. If button-up
torture devices were expensive, period tools were worth a
king's ransom. My plane, saw, hammer and chisel had cost a
year's salary. The good news was I could re-sell them for more
than I paid . . . if they weren't rusted.
I wrapped them in an oiled cloth and stowed them carefully
in my toolbox, then headed down the trail toward town.
#
I was in sight of New Austin before I spied Brenda,
looking like an albino flamingo. She was standing on one leg
while the other was turned around so the foot was at waist
level, sole upward. To do it she had twisted at hip and knee in
ways I hadn't thought humanly possible. She was nude, her skin
a uniform creamy white. She had no pubic hair.
"Hi, there, seven foot two, eyes of blue."
She glanced at me, then pointed at her foot, indignantly.
"They don't keep these paths very tidy. Look what it did
to my foot. There was a stone, with a sharp point on it."
"They specialize in sharp points around here," I said.
"It's a natural environment. You've probably never seen one
before."
"My class went to Amazon three years ago."
"Sure, on the moving walkway. While I'm at it, I'd better
tell you the plants have sharp points, too. That big thing
there is a prickly pear. Don't walk through it. That thing
behind you is a cactus, too. Don't step on it. This bush has
thorns. Over there is cenizo. It blooms after a rain; real
pretty."
She looked around, possibly realizing for the first time
that there was more than one kind of plant, and that they all
had names.
"You know what they're all called?"
"Not all. I know the big ones. Those spiky ones are yucca.
The tall ones, like whips, those are ocotillo. Most of those
short bushes are creosote. That tree is mesquite."
"Not much of a tree."
"It's not much of an environment. Things here have to
struggle to stay alive. Not like Amazon, where the plants fight
each other. Here they work too hard conserving water."
She looked around again, wincing as her injured foot
touched the ground.
"No animals?"
"They're all around you. Insects, reptiles, mostly. Some
antelope. Buffalo further east. I could show you a cougar
lair." I doubted she had any idea what a cougar was, or
antelope and buffalo, for that matter. This was a city girl
through and through. About like me before I moved to Texas,
three years ago. I relented and went down on one knee.
"Let me see that foot."
There was a ragged gash on the heel, painful but not
serious.
"Hey, your hand is hurt," she said. "What happened?"
"Just a stupid accident." I noticed as I said it that she
not only lacked pubic hair, she had no genitals. That used to
be popular sixty or seventy years ago, for children, as part of
a theory of the time concerning something called "delayed
adolescence." I hadn't seen it in at least twenty years, though
I'd heard there were religious sects that still practiced it. I
wondered if her family belonged to one, but it was much too
personal to ask about.
"I don't like this place," she said "It's dangerous." She
made it sound like an obscenity. The whole idea offended her,
as well it should, coming as she did from the most benign
environment ever created by humans.
"It's not so bad. Can you walk on that?"
"Oh, sure." She put her foot down and walked along beside
me, on her toes. As if she weren't tall enough already. "What
was that remark about seven feet? I've got two feet, just like
everyone else."
"Actually, you're closer to seven-four, I'd guess." I had
to give her a brief explanation of the English system of
weights and measures as used in the West Texas disneyland. I'm
not sure she understood it, but I didn't hold it against her,
because I didn't, either.
We had arrived in the middle of New Austin. This was no
great feat of walking; the middle is about a hundred yards from
the edge. New Austin consists of two streets: Old Spanish Trail
and Congress Street. The intersection is defined by four
buildings: The Travis Hotel, the Alamo Saloon, a general store
and a livery stable. The hotel and saloon each have a second
story. At the far end of Congress is a white clapboard Baptist
church. That, and a few dozen other ramshackle buildings strung
out between the church and Four Corners, is New Austin.
"They took all my clothes," she said.
"Naturally."
"They were perfectly good clothes."
"I'm sure they were. But only contemporary things are
allowed in here."
"What for?"
"Think of it as a living museum."
I'd been headed for the doctor's office. Considering the
time of day, I thought better of it and mounted the steps to
the saloon. We entered through the swinging doors.
It was dark inside, and a little cooler. Behind me, Brenda
had to duck to get through the doorway. A player piano tinkled
in the background, just like an old western movie. I spotted
the doctor sitting at the far end of the bar.
"Say, young lady," the bartender shouted. "You can't come
in here dressed like that." I looked around, saw her looking
down at herself in complete confusion.
"What's the matter with you people?" she shouted. "The
lady outside made me leave all my clothes with her."
"Amanda," the bartender said, "you have anything she could
wear?" He turned to Brenda again. "I don't care what you wear
out in the bush. You come into my establishment, you'll be
decently dressed. What they told you outside is no concern of
mine."
One of the bar girls approached Brenda, holding a pink
robe. I turned away. Let them sort it out.
Ever since moving to Texas, I'd played their games of
authenticity. I didn't have an accent, but I'd picked up a
smattering of words. Now I groped for one, a particularly
colorful one, and came up with it.
"I hear tell you're the sawbones around these parts," I
said.
The doctor chuckled and extended his hand.
"Ned Pepper," he said, "at your service, sir."
When I didn't shake his hand he frowned, and noticed the
dirty bandage wrapped around it.
"Looks like you threw a shoe, son. Let me take a look at
that."
He carefully unwrapped the bandage, and winced when he saw
the splinters. I could smell the sourness of his breath, and
his clothes. Doc was one of the permanent residents, like the
bartender and the rest of the hotel staff. He was an alcoholic
who had found a perfect niche for himself. In Texas he had
status and could spend most of the day swilling whiskey at the
Alamo. The drunken physician was a cliche' from a thousand
horse operas of the twentieth century, but so what? All we have
in reconstructing these past environments is books and movies.
The movies are much more helpful, one picture being equal to a
kilo-word.
"Can you do anything with it?" I asked.
He looked up in surprise, and swallowed queasily.
"I guess I could dig 'em out. Couple quarts of rye--maybe
one for you, too--though I freely admit the idea makes me want
to puke." He squinted at my hand again, and shook his head.
"You really want me to do it?"
"I don't see why not. You're a doctor, aren't you?"
"Sure, by 1845 standards. The Board trained me. Took about
a week. I got a bag full of steel tools and a cabinet full of
patent elixirs. What I don't have is an anaesthetic. I suppose
those splinters hurt going in."
"They still hurt."
"It's nothing to how it'd hurt if I took the case. Let me
. . . Hildy? Is that your name? That's right, I remember now.
Newspaperman. Last time I talked to you you seemed to know a
few things about Texas. More than most weekenders."
"I'm not a weekender," I protested. "I've been building a
cabin."
"No offense meant, son, but it started out as an
investment, didn't it?"
I admitted it. The most valuable real estate in Luna is in
the less-developed disneylands. I'd quadrupled my money so far
and there were no signs the boom was slowing.
"It's funny how much people will pay for hardship," he
said. "They warn you up front but they don't spend a lot of
time talking about medical care. People come here to live, and
they tell themselves they'll live authentic. Then they get a
taste of my medicine and run to the real world. Pain ain't
funny, Hildy. Mostly I deliver babies, and any reasonably
competent woman could do that herself."
"Then what are you good for?" I regretted it as soon as I
said it, but he didn't seem to take offense.
"I'm mostly window dressing," he admitted. "I don't mind
it. There's worse ways of earning your daily oxygen."
Brenda had drifted over to catch the last of our
conversation. She was wrapped in a ridiculous pink robe, still
favoring one foot.
"You fixed up yet?" she asked me.
"I think I'll wait," I said.
"Another lame mare?" the doctor asked. "Toss that hoof up
here, little lady, and let me take a look at it." When he had
examined the cut he grinned and rubbed his hands together.
"Here's an injury within my realm of expertise," he said. "You
want me to treat it?"
"Sure, why not?"
The doctor opened his black bag and Brenda watched him
innocently. He removed several bottles, cotton swabs, bandages,
laid it all out carefully on the bar.
"A little tincture of iodine to cleanse the wound," he
muttered, and touched a purplish wad of cotton to Brenda's
foot. She howled, and jumped four feet straight up, using only
the un-injured foot. If I hadn't grabbed her ankle she would
have hit the ceiling.
"What the hell is he doing?" she yelled at me.
"Hush, now," I soothed her.
"But it hurts."
I gave her my best determined-reporter look, grabbing her
hand to intensify the effect.
"There's a story in here, Brenda. Medicine then and now.
Think how pleased Walter will be."
"Well, why doesn't he work on you, too?" she pouted.
"It would have involved amputation," I said. And it would
have, too; I'd have cut off his hand if he laid it on me.
"I don't know if I want to--"
"Just hold still and I'll be through in a minute."
She howled, she cried, but she held still enough for him
to finish cleaning the wound. She'd make a hell of a reporter
one day.
The doctor took out a needle and thread.
"What's that for?" she asked, suspiciously.
"I have to suture the wound now," he said.
"If suture means sew up, you can suture yourself, you
bastard."
He glared at her, but saw the determination in her eyes.
He put the needle and thread away and prepared a bandage.
"Yes sir, it was hard times, 1845," he said. "You know
what caused people the most trouble? Teeth. If a tooth goes bad
here, what you do is you go to the barber down the street, or
the one over in Lonesome Dove, who's said to be quicker.
Barbers used to handle it all; teeth, surgery, and hair
cutting. But the thing about teeth, usually you could do
something. Yank it right out. Most things that happened to
people, you couldn't do anything. A little cut like this, it
could get infected and kill you. There was a million ways to
die and mostly the doctors just tried to keep you warm."
Brenda was listening with such fascination she almost
forgot to protest when he put the bandage over the wound. Then
she frowned and touched his hand as he was about to knot it
around her ankle.
"Wait a minute," she said. "You're not finished."
"I sure as hell am."
"You mean that's it?"
"What else do you suggest?"
"I still have a hole in me, you idiot. It's not fixed."
"It'll heal in about a week. All by itself."
It was clear from her look that she thought this was a
very dangerous man. She started to say something, changed her
mind, and glared at the bartender.
"Give me some of that brown stuff," she said, pointing. He
filled a shot glass with whiskey and set it in front of her.
She sipped it, made a face, and sipped again.
"That's the idea, little lady," the doctor said. "Take two
of those every morning if symptoms persist."
"What do we owe you, doc?" I asked
"Oh, I don't think I could rightly charge you . . . " His
eyes strayed to the bottles behind the bar.
"A drink for the doctor, landlord," I said. I looked
around, and smiled at myself. What the hell. "A drink for the
house. On me." People started drifting toward the bar.
"What'll it be, doc?" the bartender asked. "Grain
alcohol?"
"Some of that clear stuff," the doctor agreed.
#
We were a quarter mile out of town before Brenda spoke to
me again.
"This business about covering up," she ventured. "That's a
cultural thing, right? Something they did in this place?"
"Not the place so much as the time. Out here in the
country no one cares whether you cover up or not. But in town,
they try to stick to the old rules. They stretched a point for
you, actually. You really should have been wearing a dress that
reached your ankles, your wrists, and covered most of your
neck, too. Hell, a young lady really shouldn't have been
allowed in a saloon at all."
"Those other girls weren't wearing all that much."
"Different rule. They're 'Fallen flowers.'" She was giving
me a blank look again. "Whores."
"Oh, sure," she said. "I read an article that said it used
to be illegal. How could they make that illegal?"
"Brenda, they can make anything illegal. Prostitution has
been illegal more often than not. Don't ask me to explain it; I
don't understand, either."
"So they make a law in here, and then they let you break
it?"
"Why not? Most of those girls don't sell sex, anyway.
They're here for the tourists. Get your picture taken with the
B-girls in the Alamo Saloon. The idea of Texas is to duplicate
what it was really like in 1845, as near as we can determine.
Prostitution was illegal but tolerated in a place like New
Austin. Hell, the Sheriff would most likely be one of the
regular customers. Or take the bar. They shouldn't have served
you, because this culture didn't approve of giving alcoholic
drinks to people as young as you. But on the frontier, there
was the feeling that if you were big enough to reach up and
take the drink off the bar, you were big enough to drink it." I
looked at her frowning intently down at the ground, and knew
most of this was not getting through to her. "I don't suppose
you can ever really understand a culture unless you grew up in
it," I said.
"These people were sure screwed up."
"Probably so."
We were climbing the trail that led toward my apartment.
Brenda kept her eyes firmly on the ground, her mind obviously
elsewhere, no doubt chewing over the half-dozen crazy things
I'd told her in the past hour. By not looking around she was
missing a sunset spectacular even by the lavish standards of
West Texas. The air had turned salmon pink when the sun dipped
below the horizon, streaked by wispy curls of gold. Somehow the
waning light made the surrounding rocky hills a pale purple. I
wondered if that was authentic. A quarter of a million miles
from where I stood, the real sun was setting on the real Texas.
Were the colors as spectacular there?
Here, of course, the "sun" was sitting in its track just
below the forced-perspective "hills." A fusion tech was seeing
to the shut-down process, after which the sun would be trucked
through a tunnel and attached to the eastern end of the track,
ready to be lit again in a few hours. Somewhere behind the
hills another technician was manipulating colored mirrors and
lenses to diffuse the light over the dome of the sky. Call him
an artist; I won't argue with you. They've been charging
admission to see the sunsets in Pennsylvania and Amazon for
several years now. There's talk of doing that here, too.
It seemed unlikely to me that nature, acting at random,
could produce the incredible complexity and subtlety of a
disneyland sunset.
#
It was almost dark by the time we reached the Rio Grande.
The entrance to my condo was on the south, "Mexican" side
of the river. West Texas is compressed, to display as wide a
range of terrain and biome as possible. The variety of
geographical features that, on Earth, spread over five hundred
miles and included parts of New Mexico and Old Mexico here had
been made to fit within a sub-lunar bubble forty miles in
diameter. One edge duplicated the rolling hills and grassland
around the real Austin, while the far edge had the barren rocky
plateaus to be found around El Paso.
The part of the Rio Grande we had reached mimicked the
land east of the Big Bend in the real river, an area of steep
gorges where the water ran deep and swift. Or at least it did
in the brief rainy season. Now, in the middle of summer, it was
no trick to wade across. Brenda followed me down the forty-foot
cliff on the Texas side, then watched me splash through the
river. She had said nothing for the last few miles, and she
said nothing now, though it was clear she thought someone
should have stopped this massive water leak, or at least
provided a bridge, boat, or helicopter. But she sloshed her way
over to me and stood waiting as I located the length of rope
that would take us to the top.
"Aren't you curious about why I'm here?" she asked.
"No. I know why you're here." I tugged on the rope. It was
dark enough now that I couldn't see the ledge, fifty feet up,
where I had secured it. "Wait till I call down to you," I told
her. I set one booted foot on the cliff face.
"Walter's been pretty angry," she said. "The deadline is
just--"
"I know when the deadline is." I started up the rope, hand
over hand, feet on the dark rocks.
"What are we going to write about?" she called up at me.
"I told you. Medicine."
I had knocked out the introductory article on the Invasion
Bicentennial the night after Brenda and I got the assignment. I
thought it had been some of my best work, and Walter had
agreed. He'd given us a big spread, the cover, personality
profiles of both of us that were--in my case, at
least--irresistibly flattering. Brenda and I had then sat down
and generated a list of twenty topics just off the tops of our
heads. We didn't anticipate any trouble finding more when the
time came.
But since that first day, every time I tried to write one
of Walter's damnable articles . . . nothing happened.
Result: the cabin was coming along nicely, ahead of
schedule. Another few weeks like the past one and I'd have it
finished. And be out of a job.
I crested the top of the cliff and looked down. I could
just see the white blob that was Brenda. I called down to her
and she swarmed up like a monkey.
"Nicely done," I said, as I coiled the rope. "Did you ever
think what that would have been like if you weighed six times
what you weigh now?"
"Oddly enough, I have," she said. "I keep trying to tell
you, I'm not completely ignorant."
"Sorry."
"I'm willing to learn. I've been reading a lot. But
there's just so much, and so much of it is so foreign . . . "
She ran a hand through her hair. "Anyway, I know how hard it
must have been to live on the Earth. My arms wouldn't be strong
enough to support my weight down there." She looked down at
herself, and I thought I could see a smile. "Hell, I'm so
lunified I wonder if my legs could support my weight."
"Probably not, at first."
"I got five friends together and we took turns trying to
walk with all the others on our shoulders. I managed three
steps before I collapsed."
"You're really getting into this, aren't you?" I was
leading the way down the narrow ledge to the cave entrance.
"Of course I am. I take this very seriously. But I'm
beginning to wonder if you do."
I didn't have an answer to that. We had reached the cave,
and I started to lead her in when she pulled back violently on
my hand.
"What is that?"
She didn't need to elaborate; I came through the cave
twice a day, and I still wasn't used to the smell. Not that it
seemed as bad now as it had at first. It was a combination of
rotting meat, feces, ammonia, and something else much more
disturbing that I had taken to calling "predator smell."
"Be quiet," I whispered. "This is a cougar den. She's not
really dangerous, but she had a litter of cubs last week and
she's gotten touchy since then. Don't let go of my hand;
there's no light till we get to the door."
I didn't give her a chance to argue. I just pulled on her
hand, and we were inside.
The smell was even stronger in the cave. The mother cougar
was fairly fastidious, for an animal. She cleaned up her cubs'
messes, and she made her own outside the cave. But she wasn't
so careful about disposing of the remains of her prey before
they started to get ripe. I think she had a different
definition of "ripe." Her own fur had a rank mustiness that was
probably sweet perfume to a male cougar, but was enough to stun
the unprepared human.
I couldn't see her, but I sensed her in a way beyond sight
or hearing. I knew she wouldn't attack. Like all the large
predators in disneylands, she had been conditioned to leave
humans alone. But the conditioning set up a certain amount of
mental conflict. She didn't like us, and wasn't shy about
letting us know. When I was halfway through the cave, she let
fly with a sound I can only describe as hellish. It started as
a low growl, and quickly rose to a snarling screech. Every hair
on my body stood at attention. It's sort of a bracing feeling,
once you get used to it; your skin feels thick and tough as
leather. My scrotum grew very small and hard as it tried its
best to get certain treasures out of harm's way.
As for Brenda . . . she tried to run straight up the backs
of my legs and over the top of my head. Without some fancy
footwork on my part we both would have gone sprawling. But I'd
been ready for that reaction, and hurried along until the inner
door got out of our way with a blast of light from the far
side. Brenda didn't stop running for another twenty meters.
Then she stopped, a sheepish grin on her face, breathing
shallowly. We were in the long, utilitarian hallway that led to
the back door of my condo.
"I don't know what got into me," she said.
"Don't worry," I said. "Apparently that's one of the
sounds that is part of the human brain's hard wiring. It's a
reflex, like when you stick your finger in a flame, you don't
think about it, you instantly draw it back."
"And you hear that sound, your bowels turn to oatmeal."
"Close enough."
"I'd like to go back and see the thing that made that
sound."
"It's worth seeing," I agreed. "But you'll have to wait
for daylight. The cubs are cute. It's hard to believe they'll
turn into monsters like their mother."
#
I hesitated at the door. In my day, and up until fairly
recently, you just didn't let someone enter your home lightly.
Luna is a crowded society. There are people wherever you turn,
tripping over your feet, elbowing you, millions of intrusive,
sweaty bodies. You have to have a small place of privacy. After
you'd known someone five or ten years you might, if you really
liked the person, invite her over for drinks or sex in your own
bed. But most socializing took place on neutral ground.
The younger generation wasn't like that. They thought
nothing of dropping by just to say hello. I could make a big
thing of it, driving yet another wedge between the two of us,
or I could let it go.
What the hell. We'd have to learn to work together sooner
or later. I opened the door with my palm print and stepped
aside to let her enter.
She hurried to the washroom, saying something about having
to take a mick. I assumed that meant urinate, though I'd never
heard the term. I wondered briefly how she'd accomplish that,
given her lack of obvious outlet. I could have found out--she
left the door open. The young ones were no longer seeking
privacy even for that.
I looked around at the apartment. What would Brenda see
here? What would a pre-Invasion man see?
What they wouldn't see was dirt and clutter. A dozen
cleaning robots worked tirelessly whenever I was away. No speck
of dust was too small for their eternal vigilance, and no item
could ever be out of its assigned place longer than it took me
to walk to the tube station.
Could someone read anything about my character from
looking at this room? There were no books or paintings to give
a clue. I had all the libraries of the world a few keystrokes
away, but no books of my own. Any of the walls could project
artwork or films or environments, as desired, but they seldom
did.
There was something interesting. Unlimited computer
capacity had brought manufacturing full circle. Primitive
cultures produced articles by hand, and no two were identical.
The industrial revolution had standardized production, poured
out endless streams of items for the "consumer culture."
Finally, it became possible to have each and every manufactured
item individually ordered and designed. All my furniture was
unique. Nowhere in Luna would you find another sofa like that .
. . like that hideous monstrosity over there. And what a
blessing that was, I mused. Two of them might have mated. Damn,
but it was ugly.
I had selected almost nothing in this room. The
possibilities of taste had become so endless I had simply
thrown up my hands and taken what came with the apartment.
Maybe that was what I'd been reluctant to let Brenda see.
I supposed you could read as much into what a man had not done
to his environment as what he had done.
While I was still pondering that--and not feeling too
happy about it--Brenda came out of the washroom. She had a
bloody piece of gauze in her hand, which she tossed on the
floor. A low-slung robot darted out from under the couch and
ate it, then scuttled away. Her skin looked greased, and the
pinkish color was fading as I watched. She had visited the doc.
"I had radiation burns," she said. "I ought to take the
disneyland management to court, get them to pay the medical
bill." She lifted her foot and examined the bottom. There was a
pink area of new skin where the cut had been. In a few more
minutes it would be gone. There would be no scar. She looked
up, hastily. "I'll pay, of course. Just send me the bill."
"Forget it," I said. "I just got your lead. How long were
you in Texas?"
"Three hours? Four at the most."
"I was there for five hours, today. Except for the
gravity, it's a pretty good simulation of the natural Earthly
environment. And what happened to us?" I ticked the points off
on my fingers. "You got sunburned. Consequences, in 1845: you
would have been in for a very painful night. No sleep. Pain for
several days. Then the outer layer of your skin would slough
off. Probably some more dermatological effects. I think it
might even have caused skin cancer. That would have been fatal.
Research that one, see if I'm right.
"You injured the sole of your foot. Consequence, not too
bad, but you would have limped for a few days or a week. And
always the danger of infection to an area of the body difficult
to keep clean.
"I got a very nasty injury to my hand. Bad enough to
require minor surgery, with the possibility of deep infection,
loss of the limb, perhaps death. There's a word for it, when
one of your limbs starts to mortify. Look it up.
"So," I summed up. "Three injuries. Two possibly fatal,
over time. All in five hours. Consequences today: an almost
negligible bill from the automatic doc."
She waited for me to go on. I was prepared to let her wait
a lot longer, but she finally gave in.
"That's it? That's my story?"
"The lead, goddamit. Personalize it. You went for a walk
in the park, and this is what happened. It shows how perilous
life was back then. It shows how lightly we've come to regard
injury to our bodies, how completely we expect total, instant,
painless repairs to them. Remember what you said? 'It's not
fixed!' You'd never had anything happen to you that couldn't be
fixed, right now, with no pain."
She looked thoughtful, then smiled.
"That could work, I guess."
"Damn right it'll work. You take it from there, work in
more detail. Don't get into optional medical things; we'll keep
that for later. Make this one a pure horror story. Show how
fragile life has always been. Show how it's only in the last
century or so that we've been able to stop worrying about our
health."
"We can do that," she said.
"We, hell. I told you, this is your story. Now get out of
here and get to it. Deadline's in twenty-four hours."
I expected more argument, but I'd ignited her youthful
enthusiasm. I hustled her out the door, then leaned against it
and heaved a sigh of relief. I'd been afraid she'd call me on
it.
#
Not long after she left I went to the doc and had my own
hand healed. Then I ran a big tubful of water and eased myself
into it. The water was so hot it turned my skin pink. That's
the way I like it.
After a while I got out, rummaged in a cabinet, and found
an old home surgery kit. There was a sharp scalpel in it.
I ran some more hot water, got in again, lay back and
relaxed completely. When I was totally at peace with myself, I
slashed both my wrists right down to the bone.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
Dirty Dan the Dervish went into his trademark spin late in
the third round. By that time he had the Cytherian Cyclone
staggering.
I'm not a slash-boxing fan, but the spin was something to
see. The Dervish pumped himself up and down like a top,
balancing on the toes of his left foot. He'd draw his right leg
in to spin faster, until he was almost a blur, then, without
warning, the right foot would flash out, sometimes high,
sometimes low, sometimes connecting. Either way, he'd instantly
be pumping up and down with the left leg, spinning as if he
were on ice.
"Dervish! Dervish! Dervish!" the fans were chanting.
Brenda was shouting as loud as anyone. She was beside me, at
ringside. Most of the time she was on her feet. As for me, they
issued clear plastic sheets to everyone in the first five rows,
and I spent most of my time holding mine between me and the
ring. The Dervish had a deep gash on his right calf, and the
slashing spin could hurl blood droplets an amazing distance.
The Cyclone kept retreating, unable to come up with any
defense. He tried ducking under and attacking with the knife in
his right hand, and received another wound for his trouble. He
leaped into the air, but the Dervish was instantly with him,
slashing up from below, and as soon as their feet hit the mat
again he went into his whirl. Things were looking desperate for
the Cyclone, when he was suddenly saved by the bell.
Brenda sat down, breathing hard. I supposed that, without
sex, one needed something for release of tensions. Slash-boxing
seemed perfectly designed for that.
She wiped some of the blood from her face with a cloth,
and turned to look at me for the first time since the round
began. She seemed disappointed that I wasn't getting into the
festivities.
"How does he manage that spin?" I asked her.
"It's the mat," she said, falling instantly into the role
of expert--which must have been quite a relief for her.
"Something to do with the molecular alignment of the fibers. If
you lean on it in a certain way, you get traction, but a
circular motion reduces the friction till it's almost like ice
skating."
"Do I still have time to get a bet down?"
"No point in it," she said. "The odds will be lousy. You
should have bet when I told you, before the match started. The
Cyclone is a dead man."
He certainly looked it. Sitting on his stool, surrounded
by his pit crew, it seemed impossible he would answer the bell
for the next round. His legs were a mass of cuts, some covered
with bloody bandages. His left arm dangled by a strip of flesh;
the pit boss was considering removing it entirely. There was a
temporary shunt on his left jugular artery. It looked horribly
vulnerable, easy to hit. He had sustained that injury at the
end of the second round, which had enabled his crew to patch it
at the cost of several liters of blood. But his worst wound had
also come in the second round. It was a gash, half a meter
long, from his left hip to his right nipple. Ribs were visible
at the top, while the middle was held together with half a
dozen hasty stitches of a rawhide-like material. He had
sustained it while scoring his only effective attack on the
Dervish, bringing his knife in toward the neck, achieving
instead a ghastly but minimally disabling wound to the
Dervish's face--only to find the Dervish's knife thrust deep
into his gut. The upward jerk of that knife had spilled viscera
all over the ring and produced the first yellow flag of the
match, howls of victory from Dirty Dan's pit, and chants of
"Dervish! Dervish! Dervish!" from the crowd.
and included most of our political coverage.
Somewhere between those two was the electronic equivalent
of the Sunday supplement, published weekly, called Sundae.
"Here's what I want," Walter went on. "You'll go out and
cover your regular beats. But I want you to be thinking Sundae
while you do that. Whatever you're covering, think about how it
would have been different two hundred years ago, back on Earth.
It can be anything at all. Like today, sex. There's a topic for
you. Write about what sex was like back on Earth, and contrast
it to what it's like now. You could even throw in stuff about
what people think it's gonna be like in another twenty years,
or a century."
"Walter, I don't deserve this."
"Hildy, you're the only man for it. I want one article per
week for the entire year leading up to the bicentennial. I'm
giving you a free hand as to what they're about. You can
editorialize. You can personalize, make it like a column.
You've always wanted a column; here's your chance at a byline.
You want expensive consultants, advisors, research? You name
it, you got it. You need to travel? I'm good for the money. I
want only the best for this series."
I didn't know what to say to that. It was a good offer.
Nothing in life is ever exactly what you asked for, but I had
wanted a column, and this seemed like a reasonable shot at it.
"Hildy, during the twentieth century there was a time like
no other time humans have seen before or since. My
grandfather's great-grandfather was born in the year the Wright
brothers made the first powered flight. By the time he died,
there was a permanent base on Luna. My grandfather was ten when
the old man died, and he's told me many times how he used to
talk about the old days. It was amazing just how much change
that old man had seen in his lifetime.
"In that century they started talking about a 'generation
gap.' So much happened, so many things changed so fast, how was
a seventy-year-old supposed to talk to a fifteen-year-old in
terms they both could understand?
"Well, things don't change quite that fast anymore. I
wonder if they ever will again? But we've got something in
common with those people. We've got kids like Brenda here who
hardly remember anything beyond last year, and they're living
side by side with people who were born and grew up on the
Earth. People who remember what a one-gee gravity field was
like, what it was to walk around outside and breathe free,
un-metered air. Who were raised when people were born, grew up,
and died in the same sex. People who fought in wars. Our oldest
citizens are almost three hundred now. Surely there's fifty-two
stories in that.
"This is a story that's been waiting two hundred years to
be told. We've had our heads in the sand. We've been beaten,
humiliated, suffered a racial set-back that I'm afraid . . . "
It was as if he suddenly had heard what he was saying. He
sputtered to a stop, not looking me in the eye.
I was not used to speeches from Walter. It made me uneasy.
The assignment made me uneasy. I don't think about the Invasion
much--which was precisely his point, of course--and I think
that's just as well. But I could see his passion, and knew I'd
better not fight it. I was used to rage, to being chewed out
for this or that. Being appealed to was something brand new. I
felt it was time to lighten the atmosphere a little.
"So how big a raise are we talking about here?" I asked.
He settled back in his chair and smiled, back on familiar
ground.
"You know I never discuss that. It'll be in your next
paycheck. If you don't like it, gripe to me then."
"And I have to use the kid on all this stuff?"
"Hey! I'm right here," Brenda protested.
"The kid is vital to the whole thing. She's your sounding
board. If a fact from the old days sounds weird to her, you
know you're onto something. She's contemporary as your last
breath, she's eager to learn and fairly bright, and she knows
nothing. You'll be the middle man. You're about the right age
for it, and history's your hobby. You know more about old Earth
than any man your age I've ever met."
"If I'm in the middle . . . "
"You might want to interview my grandfather," Walter
suggested. "But there'll be a third member of your team.
Somebody Earth-born. I haven't decided yet who that'll be.
"Now get out of here, both of you."
I could see Brenda had a thousand questions she still
wanted to ask. I warned her off with my eyes, and followed her
to the door.
"And Hildy," Walter said. I looked back.
"If you put words like abnegation and infibulation in
these stories, I'll personally caponize you."
=*= =*= =*= =*=
I pulled the tarp off my pile of precious lumber and
watched the scorpions scuttle away in the sunlight. Say what
you want about the sanctity of life; I like to crush 'em.
Deeper in the pile I'd disturbed a rattlesnake. I didn't
see him, but could hear him warning me away. Handling them from
the ends, I selected a plank and pulled it out. I shouldered it
and carried it to my half-finished cabin. It was evening, the
best time to work in West Texas. The temperature had dropped to
ninety-five in the oldstyle scale they used there. During the
day it had been well over a hundred.
I positioned the plank on two sawhorses near what would be
the front porch when I was finished. I squatted and looked down
its length. This was a one-by-ten--inches, not
centimeters--which meant it actually measured about nine by
seven eighths, for reasons no one had ever explained to me.
Thinking in inches was difficult enough, without dealing in
those odd ratios called fractions. What was wrong with
decimals, and what was wrong with a one-by-ten actually being
one inch by ten inches? Why twelve inches in a foot? Maybe
there was a story in it for the bicentennial series.
The plank had been advertised as ten feet long, and that
measurement was accurate. It was also supposed to be straight,
but if it was they had used a noodle for a straightedge.
Texas was the second of what was to be three disneylands
devoted to the eighteenth century. Out here west of the Pecos
we reckoned it to be 1845, the last year of the Texas Republic,
though you could use technology as recent as 1899 without
running afoul of the anachronism regulations. Pennsylvania had
been the first of the triad, and my plank, complete with two
big bulges in the width and a depressing sag when held by one
end, had been milled there by "Amish" sawyers using the old
methods. A little oval stamp in a corner guaranteed this:
"Approved, Lunar Antiquities Reproduction Board." Either the
methods of the 1800's couldn't reliably produce straight and
true lumber, or those damn Dutchmen were still learning their
craft.
So I did what the carpenters of the Texas Republic had
done. I got out my plane (also certified by the L.A.R.B.),
removed the primitive blade, sharpened it against a home-made
whetstone, re-attached the blade, and began shaving away the
irregularities.
I'm not complaining. I was lucky to get the lumber. Most
of the cabin was made of rough-hewn logs notched together at
the ends, chinked with adobe.
The board had turned gray in the heat and sun, but after a
few strokes I was down to the yellow pine interior. The wood
curled up around the blade and the chips dropped around my bare
feet. It smelled fresh and new and I found myself smiling as
the sweat dripped off my nose. It would be good to be a
carpenter, I thought. Maybe I'd quit the newspaper business.
Then the blade broke and jammed into the wood. My palm
slipped off the knob in front and tried to skate across the
fresh-planed surface, driving long splinters into my skin. The
plane clattered off the board and went for my toe with the
hellish accuracy of a pain-guided missile.
I shouted a few words rarely heard in 1845, and some
uncommon even in the 23rd century. I hopped around on one foot.
Another lost art, hopping.
"It could have been worse," a voice said in my ear. It was
either incipient schizophrenia, or the Central Computer. I bet
on the CC.
"How? By hitting both feet?"
"Gravity. Consider the momentum such a massive object
could have attained, had this really been West Texas, which
lies at the bottom of a spacetime depression twenty-five
thousand miles per hour deep."
Definitely the CC.
I examined my hand. Blood was oozing from it, running down
my forearm and dripping from the elbow. But there was no
arterial pumping. The foot, though it still hurt like fire, was
not damaged.
"You see now why laborers in 1845 wore work boots."
"Is that why you called, CC? To give me a lecture about
safety in the work place?"
"No. I was going to announce a visitor. The colorful
language lesson was an unexpected bonus of my tuning in on--"
"Shut up, will you?"
The Central Computer did so.
The end of a splinter protruded from my palm, so I pulled
on it. I got some, but a lot was still buried in there. Others
had broken off below skin level. All in all, a wonderful day's
work.
A visitor? I looked around and saw no one, though a whole
tribe of Apaches could have been hiding in the clumps of
mesquite. I had not expected to see any sign of the CC. It uses
the circuitry in my own head to produce its voice.
And it wasn't supposed to manifest itself in Texas. As is
often the case, there was more to the CC than it was telling.
"CC, on-line, please."
"I hear and obey."
"Who's the visitor?"
"Tall, young, ignorant of tampons, with a certain
puppy-like charm--"
"Oh, Jesus."
"I know I'm not supposed to intrude on these antique
environments, but she was quite insistent on learning your
location, and I thought it better for you to have some
forewarning than to--"
"Okay. Now shut up."
I sat in the rickety chair which had been my first
carpentry project. Being careful of the injured hand, I pulled
on the work boots I should have been wearing all along. The
reason I hadn't was simple: I hated them.
There was another story for Walter. Shoes. If Lunarians
wear them, they tend to be the soft kind, like moccasins, or
socks. Reason: in a crowded urban environment of perfectly
smooth floors and carpets and a majority of bare-foot people,
hard shoes are anti-social. You could break someone else's
toes.
Once I had my feet jammed into the smelly things I had to
search for the buttonhook. Buttons, on shoes! It was
outrageous. How had people ever tolerated such things? To add
insult to inutility, the damn things had cost me a fortune.
I stood and was about to head into town when the CC spoke
again.
"If you leave those tools out and it rains, they will
combine with the oxygen in the air in a slow combustion
reaction."
"Rust is too poor a word for you, right? It rains out here
. . . what? Once every hundred days?"
But my heart wasn't in it. The CC was right. If button-up
torture devices were expensive, period tools were worth a
king's ransom. My plane, saw, hammer and chisel had cost a
year's salary. The good news was I could re-sell them for more
than I paid . . . if they weren't rusted.
I wrapped them in an oiled cloth and stowed them carefully
in my toolbox, then headed down the trail toward town.
#
I was in sight of New Austin before I spied Brenda,
looking like an albino flamingo. She was standing on one leg
while the other was turned around so the foot was at waist
level, sole upward. To do it she had twisted at hip and knee in
ways I hadn't thought humanly possible. She was nude, her skin
a uniform creamy white. She had no pubic hair.
"Hi, there, seven foot two, eyes of blue."
She glanced at me, then pointed at her foot, indignantly.
"They don't keep these paths very tidy. Look what it did
to my foot. There was a stone, with a sharp point on it."
"They specialize in sharp points around here," I said.
"It's a natural environment. You've probably never seen one
before."
"My class went to Amazon three years ago."
"Sure, on the moving walkway. While I'm at it, I'd better
tell you the plants have sharp points, too. That big thing
there is a prickly pear. Don't walk through it. That thing
behind you is a cactus, too. Don't step on it. This bush has
thorns. Over there is cenizo. It blooms after a rain; real
pretty."
She looked around, possibly realizing for the first time
that there was more than one kind of plant, and that they all
had names.
"You know what they're all called?"
"Not all. I know the big ones. Those spiky ones are yucca.
The tall ones, like whips, those are ocotillo. Most of those
short bushes are creosote. That tree is mesquite."
"Not much of a tree."
"It's not much of an environment. Things here have to
struggle to stay alive. Not like Amazon, where the plants fight
each other. Here they work too hard conserving water."
She looked around again, wincing as her injured foot
touched the ground.
"No animals?"
"They're all around you. Insects, reptiles, mostly. Some
antelope. Buffalo further east. I could show you a cougar
lair." I doubted she had any idea what a cougar was, or
antelope and buffalo, for that matter. This was a city girl
through and through. About like me before I moved to Texas,
three years ago. I relented and went down on one knee.
"Let me see that foot."
There was a ragged gash on the heel, painful but not
serious.
"Hey, your hand is hurt," she said. "What happened?"
"Just a stupid accident." I noticed as I said it that she
not only lacked pubic hair, she had no genitals. That used to
be popular sixty or seventy years ago, for children, as part of
a theory of the time concerning something called "delayed
adolescence." I hadn't seen it in at least twenty years, though
I'd heard there were religious sects that still practiced it. I
wondered if her family belonged to one, but it was much too
personal to ask about.
"I don't like this place," she said "It's dangerous." She
made it sound like an obscenity. The whole idea offended her,
as well it should, coming as she did from the most benign
environment ever created by humans.
"It's not so bad. Can you walk on that?"
"Oh, sure." She put her foot down and walked along beside
me, on her toes. As if she weren't tall enough already. "What
was that remark about seven feet? I've got two feet, just like
everyone else."
"Actually, you're closer to seven-four, I'd guess." I had
to give her a brief explanation of the English system of
weights and measures as used in the West Texas disneyland. I'm
not sure she understood it, but I didn't hold it against her,
because I didn't, either.
We had arrived in the middle of New Austin. This was no
great feat of walking; the middle is about a hundred yards from
the edge. New Austin consists of two streets: Old Spanish Trail
and Congress Street. The intersection is defined by four
buildings: The Travis Hotel, the Alamo Saloon, a general store
and a livery stable. The hotel and saloon each have a second
story. At the far end of Congress is a white clapboard Baptist
church. That, and a few dozen other ramshackle buildings strung
out between the church and Four Corners, is New Austin.
"They took all my clothes," she said.
"Naturally."
"They were perfectly good clothes."
"I'm sure they were. But only contemporary things are
allowed in here."
"What for?"
"Think of it as a living museum."
I'd been headed for the doctor's office. Considering the
time of day, I thought better of it and mounted the steps to
the saloon. We entered through the swinging doors.
It was dark inside, and a little cooler. Behind me, Brenda
had to duck to get through the doorway. A player piano tinkled
in the background, just like an old western movie. I spotted
the doctor sitting at the far end of the bar.
"Say, young lady," the bartender shouted. "You can't come
in here dressed like that." I looked around, saw her looking
down at herself in complete confusion.
"What's the matter with you people?" she shouted. "The
lady outside made me leave all my clothes with her."
"Amanda," the bartender said, "you have anything she could
wear?" He turned to Brenda again. "I don't care what you wear
out in the bush. You come into my establishment, you'll be
decently dressed. What they told you outside is no concern of
mine."
One of the bar girls approached Brenda, holding a pink
robe. I turned away. Let them sort it out.
Ever since moving to Texas, I'd played their games of
authenticity. I didn't have an accent, but I'd picked up a
smattering of words. Now I groped for one, a particularly
colorful one, and came up with it.
"I hear tell you're the sawbones around these parts," I
said.
The doctor chuckled and extended his hand.
"Ned Pepper," he said, "at your service, sir."
When I didn't shake his hand he frowned, and noticed the
dirty bandage wrapped around it.
"Looks like you threw a shoe, son. Let me take a look at
that."
He carefully unwrapped the bandage, and winced when he saw
the splinters. I could smell the sourness of his breath, and
his clothes. Doc was one of the permanent residents, like the
bartender and the rest of the hotel staff. He was an alcoholic
who had found a perfect niche for himself. In Texas he had
status and could spend most of the day swilling whiskey at the
Alamo. The drunken physician was a cliche' from a thousand
horse operas of the twentieth century, but so what? All we have
in reconstructing these past environments is books and movies.
The movies are much more helpful, one picture being equal to a
kilo-word.
"Can you do anything with it?" I asked.
He looked up in surprise, and swallowed queasily.
"I guess I could dig 'em out. Couple quarts of rye--maybe
one for you, too--though I freely admit the idea makes me want
to puke." He squinted at my hand again, and shook his head.
"You really want me to do it?"
"I don't see why not. You're a doctor, aren't you?"
"Sure, by 1845 standards. The Board trained me. Took about
a week. I got a bag full of steel tools and a cabinet full of
patent elixirs. What I don't have is an anaesthetic. I suppose
those splinters hurt going in."
"They still hurt."
"It's nothing to how it'd hurt if I took the case. Let me
. . . Hildy? Is that your name? That's right, I remember now.
Newspaperman. Last time I talked to you you seemed to know a
few things about Texas. More than most weekenders."
"I'm not a weekender," I protested. "I've been building a
cabin."
"No offense meant, son, but it started out as an
investment, didn't it?"
I admitted it. The most valuable real estate in Luna is in
the less-developed disneylands. I'd quadrupled my money so far
and there were no signs the boom was slowing.
"It's funny how much people will pay for hardship," he
said. "They warn you up front but they don't spend a lot of
time talking about medical care. People come here to live, and
they tell themselves they'll live authentic. Then they get a
taste of my medicine and run to the real world. Pain ain't
funny, Hildy. Mostly I deliver babies, and any reasonably
competent woman could do that herself."
"Then what are you good for?" I regretted it as soon as I
said it, but he didn't seem to take offense.
"I'm mostly window dressing," he admitted. "I don't mind
it. There's worse ways of earning your daily oxygen."
Brenda had drifted over to catch the last of our
conversation. She was wrapped in a ridiculous pink robe, still
favoring one foot.
"You fixed up yet?" she asked me.
"I think I'll wait," I said.
"Another lame mare?" the doctor asked. "Toss that hoof up
here, little lady, and let me take a look at it." When he had
examined the cut he grinned and rubbed his hands together.
"Here's an injury within my realm of expertise," he said. "You
want me to treat it?"
"Sure, why not?"
The doctor opened his black bag and Brenda watched him
innocently. He removed several bottles, cotton swabs, bandages,
laid it all out carefully on the bar.
"A little tincture of iodine to cleanse the wound," he
muttered, and touched a purplish wad of cotton to Brenda's
foot. She howled, and jumped four feet straight up, using only
the un-injured foot. If I hadn't grabbed her ankle she would
have hit the ceiling.
"What the hell is he doing?" she yelled at me.
"Hush, now," I soothed her.
"But it hurts."
I gave her my best determined-reporter look, grabbing her
hand to intensify the effect.
"There's a story in here, Brenda. Medicine then and now.
Think how pleased Walter will be."
"Well, why doesn't he work on you, too?" she pouted.
"It would have involved amputation," I said. And it would
have, too; I'd have cut off his hand if he laid it on me.
"I don't know if I want to--"
"Just hold still and I'll be through in a minute."
She howled, she cried, but she held still enough for him
to finish cleaning the wound. She'd make a hell of a reporter
one day.
The doctor took out a needle and thread.
"What's that for?" she asked, suspiciously.
"I have to suture the wound now," he said.
"If suture means sew up, you can suture yourself, you
bastard."
He glared at her, but saw the determination in her eyes.
He put the needle and thread away and prepared a bandage.
"Yes sir, it was hard times, 1845," he said. "You know
what caused people the most trouble? Teeth. If a tooth goes bad
here, what you do is you go to the barber down the street, or
the one over in Lonesome Dove, who's said to be quicker.
Barbers used to handle it all; teeth, surgery, and hair
cutting. But the thing about teeth, usually you could do
something. Yank it right out. Most things that happened to
people, you couldn't do anything. A little cut like this, it
could get infected and kill you. There was a million ways to
die and mostly the doctors just tried to keep you warm."
Brenda was listening with such fascination she almost
forgot to protest when he put the bandage over the wound. Then
she frowned and touched his hand as he was about to knot it
around her ankle.
"Wait a minute," she said. "You're not finished."
"I sure as hell am."
"You mean that's it?"
"What else do you suggest?"
"I still have a hole in me, you idiot. It's not fixed."
"It'll heal in about a week. All by itself."
It was clear from her look that she thought this was a
very dangerous man. She started to say something, changed her
mind, and glared at the bartender.
"Give me some of that brown stuff," she said, pointing. He
filled a shot glass with whiskey and set it in front of her.
She sipped it, made a face, and sipped again.
"That's the idea, little lady," the doctor said. "Take two
of those every morning if symptoms persist."
"What do we owe you, doc?" I asked
"Oh, I don't think I could rightly charge you . . . " His
eyes strayed to the bottles behind the bar.
"A drink for the doctor, landlord," I said. I looked
around, and smiled at myself. What the hell. "A drink for the
house. On me." People started drifting toward the bar.
"What'll it be, doc?" the bartender asked. "Grain
alcohol?"
"Some of that clear stuff," the doctor agreed.
#
We were a quarter mile out of town before Brenda spoke to
me again.
"This business about covering up," she ventured. "That's a
cultural thing, right? Something they did in this place?"
"Not the place so much as the time. Out here in the
country no one cares whether you cover up or not. But in town,
they try to stick to the old rules. They stretched a point for
you, actually. You really should have been wearing a dress that
reached your ankles, your wrists, and covered most of your
neck, too. Hell, a young lady really shouldn't have been
allowed in a saloon at all."
"Those other girls weren't wearing all that much."
"Different rule. They're 'Fallen flowers.'" She was giving
me a blank look again. "Whores."
"Oh, sure," she said. "I read an article that said it used
to be illegal. How could they make that illegal?"
"Brenda, they can make anything illegal. Prostitution has
been illegal more often than not. Don't ask me to explain it; I
don't understand, either."
"So they make a law in here, and then they let you break
it?"
"Why not? Most of those girls don't sell sex, anyway.
They're here for the tourists. Get your picture taken with the
B-girls in the Alamo Saloon. The idea of Texas is to duplicate
what it was really like in 1845, as near as we can determine.
Prostitution was illegal but tolerated in a place like New
Austin. Hell, the Sheriff would most likely be one of the
regular customers. Or take the bar. They shouldn't have served
you, because this culture didn't approve of giving alcoholic
drinks to people as young as you. But on the frontier, there
was the feeling that if you were big enough to reach up and
take the drink off the bar, you were big enough to drink it." I
looked at her frowning intently down at the ground, and knew
most of this was not getting through to her. "I don't suppose
you can ever really understand a culture unless you grew up in
it," I said.
"These people were sure screwed up."
"Probably so."
We were climbing the trail that led toward my apartment.
Brenda kept her eyes firmly on the ground, her mind obviously
elsewhere, no doubt chewing over the half-dozen crazy things
I'd told her in the past hour. By not looking around she was
missing a sunset spectacular even by the lavish standards of
West Texas. The air had turned salmon pink when the sun dipped
below the horizon, streaked by wispy curls of gold. Somehow the
waning light made the surrounding rocky hills a pale purple. I
wondered if that was authentic. A quarter of a million miles
from where I stood, the real sun was setting on the real Texas.
Were the colors as spectacular there?
Here, of course, the "sun" was sitting in its track just
below the forced-perspective "hills." A fusion tech was seeing
to the shut-down process, after which the sun would be trucked
through a tunnel and attached to the eastern end of the track,
ready to be lit again in a few hours. Somewhere behind the
hills another technician was manipulating colored mirrors and
lenses to diffuse the light over the dome of the sky. Call him
an artist; I won't argue with you. They've been charging
admission to see the sunsets in Pennsylvania and Amazon for
several years now. There's talk of doing that here, too.
It seemed unlikely to me that nature, acting at random,
could produce the incredible complexity and subtlety of a
disneyland sunset.
#
It was almost dark by the time we reached the Rio Grande.
The entrance to my condo was on the south, "Mexican" side
of the river. West Texas is compressed, to display as wide a
range of terrain and biome as possible. The variety of
geographical features that, on Earth, spread over five hundred
miles and included parts of New Mexico and Old Mexico here had
been made to fit within a sub-lunar bubble forty miles in
diameter. One edge duplicated the rolling hills and grassland
around the real Austin, while the far edge had the barren rocky
plateaus to be found around El Paso.
The part of the Rio Grande we had reached mimicked the
land east of the Big Bend in the real river, an area of steep
gorges where the water ran deep and swift. Or at least it did
in the brief rainy season. Now, in the middle of summer, it was
no trick to wade across. Brenda followed me down the forty-foot
cliff on the Texas side, then watched me splash through the
river. She had said nothing for the last few miles, and she
said nothing now, though it was clear she thought someone
should have stopped this massive water leak, or at least
provided a bridge, boat, or helicopter. But she sloshed her way
over to me and stood waiting as I located the length of rope
that would take us to the top.
"Aren't you curious about why I'm here?" she asked.
"No. I know why you're here." I tugged on the rope. It was
dark enough now that I couldn't see the ledge, fifty feet up,
where I had secured it. "Wait till I call down to you," I told
her. I set one booted foot on the cliff face.
"Walter's been pretty angry," she said. "The deadline is
just--"
"I know when the deadline is." I started up the rope, hand
over hand, feet on the dark rocks.
"What are we going to write about?" she called up at me.
"I told you. Medicine."
I had knocked out the introductory article on the Invasion
Bicentennial the night after Brenda and I got the assignment. I
thought it had been some of my best work, and Walter had
agreed. He'd given us a big spread, the cover, personality
profiles of both of us that were--in my case, at
least--irresistibly flattering. Brenda and I had then sat down
and generated a list of twenty topics just off the tops of our
heads. We didn't anticipate any trouble finding more when the
time came.
But since that first day, every time I tried to write one
of Walter's damnable articles . . . nothing happened.
Result: the cabin was coming along nicely, ahead of
schedule. Another few weeks like the past one and I'd have it
finished. And be out of a job.
I crested the top of the cliff and looked down. I could
just see the white blob that was Brenda. I called down to her
and she swarmed up like a monkey.
"Nicely done," I said, as I coiled the rope. "Did you ever
think what that would have been like if you weighed six times
what you weigh now?"
"Oddly enough, I have," she said. "I keep trying to tell
you, I'm not completely ignorant."
"Sorry."
"I'm willing to learn. I've been reading a lot. But
there's just so much, and so much of it is so foreign . . . "
She ran a hand through her hair. "Anyway, I know how hard it
must have been to live on the Earth. My arms wouldn't be strong
enough to support my weight down there." She looked down at
herself, and I thought I could see a smile. "Hell, I'm so
lunified I wonder if my legs could support my weight."
"Probably not, at first."
"I got five friends together and we took turns trying to
walk with all the others on our shoulders. I managed three
steps before I collapsed."
"You're really getting into this, aren't you?" I was
leading the way down the narrow ledge to the cave entrance.
"Of course I am. I take this very seriously. But I'm
beginning to wonder if you do."
I didn't have an answer to that. We had reached the cave,
and I started to lead her in when she pulled back violently on
my hand.
"What is that?"
She didn't need to elaborate; I came through the cave
twice a day, and I still wasn't used to the smell. Not that it
seemed as bad now as it had at first. It was a combination of
rotting meat, feces, ammonia, and something else much more
disturbing that I had taken to calling "predator smell."
"Be quiet," I whispered. "This is a cougar den. She's not
really dangerous, but she had a litter of cubs last week and
she's gotten touchy since then. Don't let go of my hand;
there's no light till we get to the door."
I didn't give her a chance to argue. I just pulled on her
hand, and we were inside.
The smell was even stronger in the cave. The mother cougar
was fairly fastidious, for an animal. She cleaned up her cubs'
messes, and she made her own outside the cave. But she wasn't
so careful about disposing of the remains of her prey before
they started to get ripe. I think she had a different
definition of "ripe." Her own fur had a rank mustiness that was
probably sweet perfume to a male cougar, but was enough to stun
the unprepared human.
I couldn't see her, but I sensed her in a way beyond sight
or hearing. I knew she wouldn't attack. Like all the large
predators in disneylands, she had been conditioned to leave
humans alone. But the conditioning set up a certain amount of
mental conflict. She didn't like us, and wasn't shy about
letting us know. When I was halfway through the cave, she let
fly with a sound I can only describe as hellish. It started as
a low growl, and quickly rose to a snarling screech. Every hair
on my body stood at attention. It's sort of a bracing feeling,
once you get used to it; your skin feels thick and tough as
leather. My scrotum grew very small and hard as it tried its
best to get certain treasures out of harm's way.
As for Brenda . . . she tried to run straight up the backs
of my legs and over the top of my head. Without some fancy
footwork on my part we both would have gone sprawling. But I'd
been ready for that reaction, and hurried along until the inner
door got out of our way with a blast of light from the far
side. Brenda didn't stop running for another twenty meters.
Then she stopped, a sheepish grin on her face, breathing
shallowly. We were in the long, utilitarian hallway that led to
the back door of my condo.
"I don't know what got into me," she said.
"Don't worry," I said. "Apparently that's one of the
sounds that is part of the human brain's hard wiring. It's a
reflex, like when you stick your finger in a flame, you don't
think about it, you instantly draw it back."
"And you hear that sound, your bowels turn to oatmeal."
"Close enough."
"I'd like to go back and see the thing that made that
sound."
"It's worth seeing," I agreed. "But you'll have to wait
for daylight. The cubs are cute. It's hard to believe they'll
turn into monsters like their mother."
#
I hesitated at the door. In my day, and up until fairly
recently, you just didn't let someone enter your home lightly.
Luna is a crowded society. There are people wherever you turn,
tripping over your feet, elbowing you, millions of intrusive,
sweaty bodies. You have to have a small place of privacy. After
you'd known someone five or ten years you might, if you really
liked the person, invite her over for drinks or sex in your own
bed. But most socializing took place on neutral ground.
The younger generation wasn't like that. They thought
nothing of dropping by just to say hello. I could make a big
thing of it, driving yet another wedge between the two of us,
or I could let it go.
What the hell. We'd have to learn to work together sooner
or later. I opened the door with my palm print and stepped
aside to let her enter.
She hurried to the washroom, saying something about having
to take a mick. I assumed that meant urinate, though I'd never
heard the term. I wondered briefly how she'd accomplish that,
given her lack of obvious outlet. I could have found out--she
left the door open. The young ones were no longer seeking
privacy even for that.
I looked around at the apartment. What would Brenda see
here? What would a pre-Invasion man see?
What they wouldn't see was dirt and clutter. A dozen
cleaning robots worked tirelessly whenever I was away. No speck
of dust was too small for their eternal vigilance, and no item
could ever be out of its assigned place longer than it took me
to walk to the tube station.
Could someone read anything about my character from
looking at this room? There were no books or paintings to give
a clue. I had all the libraries of the world a few keystrokes
away, but no books of my own. Any of the walls could project
artwork or films or environments, as desired, but they seldom
did.
There was something interesting. Unlimited computer
capacity had brought manufacturing full circle. Primitive
cultures produced articles by hand, and no two were identical.
The industrial revolution had standardized production, poured
out endless streams of items for the "consumer culture."
Finally, it became possible to have each and every manufactured
item individually ordered and designed. All my furniture was
unique. Nowhere in Luna would you find another sofa like that .
. . like that hideous monstrosity over there. And what a
blessing that was, I mused. Two of them might have mated. Damn,
but it was ugly.
I had selected almost nothing in this room. The
possibilities of taste had become so endless I had simply
thrown up my hands and taken what came with the apartment.
Maybe that was what I'd been reluctant to let Brenda see.
I supposed you could read as much into what a man had not done
to his environment as what he had done.
While I was still pondering that--and not feeling too
happy about it--Brenda came out of the washroom. She had a
bloody piece of gauze in her hand, which she tossed on the
floor. A low-slung robot darted out from under the couch and
ate it, then scuttled away. Her skin looked greased, and the
pinkish color was fading as I watched. She had visited the doc.
"I had radiation burns," she said. "I ought to take the
disneyland management to court, get them to pay the medical
bill." She lifted her foot and examined the bottom. There was a
pink area of new skin where the cut had been. In a few more
minutes it would be gone. There would be no scar. She looked
up, hastily. "I'll pay, of course. Just send me the bill."
"Forget it," I said. "I just got your lead. How long were
you in Texas?"
"Three hours? Four at the most."
"I was there for five hours, today. Except for the
gravity, it's a pretty good simulation of the natural Earthly
environment. And what happened to us?" I ticked the points off
on my fingers. "You got sunburned. Consequences, in 1845: you
would have been in for a very painful night. No sleep. Pain for
several days. Then the outer layer of your skin would slough
off. Probably some more dermatological effects. I think it
might even have caused skin cancer. That would have been fatal.
Research that one, see if I'm right.
"You injured the sole of your foot. Consequence, not too
bad, but you would have limped for a few days or a week. And
always the danger of infection to an area of the body difficult
to keep clean.
"I got a very nasty injury to my hand. Bad enough to
require minor surgery, with the possibility of deep infection,
loss of the limb, perhaps death. There's a word for it, when
one of your limbs starts to mortify. Look it up.
"So," I summed up. "Three injuries. Two possibly fatal,
over time. All in five hours. Consequences today: an almost
negligible bill from the automatic doc."
She waited for me to go on. I was prepared to let her wait
a lot longer, but she finally gave in.
"That's it? That's my story?"
"The lead, goddamit. Personalize it. You went for a walk
in the park, and this is what happened. It shows how perilous
life was back then. It shows how lightly we've come to regard
injury to our bodies, how completely we expect total, instant,
painless repairs to them. Remember what you said? 'It's not
fixed!' You'd never had anything happen to you that couldn't be
fixed, right now, with no pain."
She looked thoughtful, then smiled.
"That could work, I guess."
"Damn right it'll work. You take it from there, work in
more detail. Don't get into optional medical things; we'll keep
that for later. Make this one a pure horror story. Show how
fragile life has always been. Show how it's only in the last
century or so that we've been able to stop worrying about our
health."
"We can do that," she said.
"We, hell. I told you, this is your story. Now get out of
here and get to it. Deadline's in twenty-four hours."
I expected more argument, but I'd ignited her youthful
enthusiasm. I hustled her out the door, then leaned against it
and heaved a sigh of relief. I'd been afraid she'd call me on
it.
#
Not long after she left I went to the doc and had my own
hand healed. Then I ran a big tubful of water and eased myself
into it. The water was so hot it turned my skin pink. That's
the way I like it.
After a while I got out, rummaged in a cabinet, and found
an old home surgery kit. There was a sharp scalpel in it.
I ran some more hot water, got in again, lay back and
relaxed completely. When I was totally at peace with myself, I
slashed both my wrists right down to the bone.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
Dirty Dan the Dervish went into his trademark spin late in
the third round. By that time he had the Cytherian Cyclone
staggering.
I'm not a slash-boxing fan, but the spin was something to
see. The Dervish pumped himself up and down like a top,
balancing on the toes of his left foot. He'd draw his right leg
in to spin faster, until he was almost a blur, then, without
warning, the right foot would flash out, sometimes high,
sometimes low, sometimes connecting. Either way, he'd instantly
be pumping up and down with the left leg, spinning as if he
were on ice.
"Dervish! Dervish! Dervish!" the fans were chanting.
Brenda was shouting as loud as anyone. She was beside me, at
ringside. Most of the time she was on her feet. As for me, they
issued clear plastic sheets to everyone in the first five rows,
and I spent most of my time holding mine between me and the
ring. The Dervish had a deep gash on his right calf, and the
slashing spin could hurl blood droplets an amazing distance.
The Cyclone kept retreating, unable to come up with any
defense. He tried ducking under and attacking with the knife in
his right hand, and received another wound for his trouble. He
leaped into the air, but the Dervish was instantly with him,
slashing up from below, and as soon as their feet hit the mat
again he went into his whirl. Things were looking desperate for
the Cyclone, when he was suddenly saved by the bell.
Brenda sat down, breathing hard. I supposed that, without
sex, one needed something for release of tensions. Slash-boxing
seemed perfectly designed for that.
She wiped some of the blood from her face with a cloth,
and turned to look at me for the first time since the round
began. She seemed disappointed that I wasn't getting into the
festivities.
"How does he manage that spin?" I asked her.
"It's the mat," she said, falling instantly into the role
of expert--which must have been quite a relief for her.
"Something to do with the molecular alignment of the fibers. If
you lean on it in a certain way, you get traction, but a
circular motion reduces the friction till it's almost like ice
skating."
"Do I still have time to get a bet down?"
"No point in it," she said. "The odds will be lousy. You
should have bet when I told you, before the match started. The
Cyclone is a dead man."
He certainly looked it. Sitting on his stool, surrounded
by his pit crew, it seemed impossible he would answer the bell
for the next round. His legs were a mass of cuts, some covered
with bloody bandages. His left arm dangled by a strip of flesh;
the pit boss was considering removing it entirely. There was a
temporary shunt on his left jugular artery. It looked horribly
vulnerable, easy to hit. He had sustained that injury at the
end of the second round, which had enabled his crew to patch it
at the cost of several liters of blood. But his worst wound had
also come in the second round. It was a gash, half a meter
long, from his left hip to his right nipple. Ribs were visible
at the top, while the middle was held together with half a
dozen hasty stitches of a rawhide-like material. He had
sustained it while scoring his only effective attack on the
Dervish, bringing his knife in toward the neck, achieving
instead a ghastly but minimally disabling wound to the
Dervish's face--only to find the Dervish's knife thrust deep
into his gut. The upward jerk of that knife had spilled viscera
all over the ring and produced the first yellow flag of the
match, howls of victory from Dirty Dan's pit, and chants of
"Dervish! Dervish! Dervish!" from the crowd.