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silently over my head, not ten meters high, and I'd have jumped
out of my socks if I'd had any on. It turned, and I saw the big
double-n Nipple logo blazoned on its side and it was a sweet
sight indeed.
The driver flew a big oval at the right distance from the
Heinlein, which was almost out of sight by then, letting me see
him because I had to come to him, not the other way around.
Then it settled down off to my right, looking like a giant
mosquito in carnal embrace with a bedstead. I started to run.
He must have had some sort of sensor on the ladder,
because when I had both feet on it the jumper lifted off. Not
the sort of maneuver I'd like to do on a Sunday jaunt, but I
could understand his haste. I wrenched the lock door open and
cycled it, and stepped inside to the unlikely spectacle of
Walter training a machine gun on me.
Ho-hum. I'd had so many weapons pointed at me in the last
few hours that the sight--which would have given me pause a
year ago, say at contract renegotiation time--barely
registered. I experienced something I'd noticed before at the
end of times of great stress: I wanted to go to sleep.
"Put that thing away, Walter," I said. "If you fire it
you'd probably kill us both."
"This is a reinforced pressure hull," he said, and the gun
didn't waver. "Turn that suit off first."
"I wasn't thinking about decompression," I said. "I was
thinking you'd probably shoot yourself in the foot, then get
lucky and hit me." But I turned it off, and he looked at my
face, glanced down at my naked, outrageously pregnant body, and
then looked away. He stowed the weapon and resumed his place in
the pilot's seat. I struggled into the seat beside him.
"Pretty eventful day," I said.
"I wish you'd get back to covering the news instead of
making it," he said. "What'd you do to get the CC so riled up?"
"That was me? This is all about me?"
"No, but you're a big part of it."
"Tell me what's happening."
"Nobody knows the whole thing yet," he said, and then
started telling me the little he knew.
It had begun--back in the normal world--with thousands of
elevators stalling between levels. No sooner had emergency
crews been dispatched than other things began to go haywire.
Soon all the mass media were off the air and Walter had had
reports that pressure had been breached in several major
cities, and other places had suffered oxygen depletion. There
were fires, and riots, and mass confusion. Then, shortly before
he got the call from me, the CC had come on most major
frequencies with an announcement meant to reassure but oddly
unsettling. He said there had been malfunctions, but that they
were under control now. ("An obvious lie," Walter told me,
almost with relish.) The CC had pledged to do a better job in
the future, promised this wouldn't happen again. He'd said he
was in control now.
"The first implication I got from that," Walter said, "was
that he hadn't been in control for a while, and I want an
explanation of that. But the thing that really got me, after I
thought about it, was . . . what kind of control did he mean?"
"I'm not sure I understand."
"Well, obviously he's in control, or he's supposed to be.
Of the day-to-day mechanics of Luna. Air, water,
transportation. In the sense that he runs those things. And
he's got a lot of control in the civil and criminal social
sectors. He makes schedules for the government, for instance.
He's got a hand in everything. He monitors everything. But in
control? I didn't like the sound of it. I still don't."
While I thought that one over something very bright and
very fast overtook us, shot by on the left, then tried to hang
a right, as if it had changed its mind. It turned into a
fireball and we flew right into it. I heard things pinging on
the hull, things the size of sand grains.
"What the hell was that?"
"Some of your friends back there. Don't worry, I'm on top
of it."
"On top of it . . .? They're shooting at us!"
"And missing. And we're out of range. And this ship is
equipped with the best illegal jamming devices money can buy.
I've got tricks I haven't even used yet."
I glanced at him, a big unruly bear of a man, hunched over
his manual controls and keeping one eye on an array of devices
attached to the dashboard, devices I was sure hadn't come from
the factory that built the jumper.
"I might have known you'd have connections with the
Heinleiners," I said.
"Connections?" he snorted. "I was on the board of
directors of the L5 Society when most of those 'Heinleiners'
hadn't even been born yet. My father was there when the keel of
that ship was launched. You might say I have connections."
"But you're not one of them."
"Let's say we have some political differences."
He probably thought they were too left-wing. Long ago in
our relationship I'd talked a little politics with Walter, as
most people did who came to work at the Nipple. Not many had a
second conversation. The most charitable word I'd heard used to
describe his convictions was "daft." What most people would
think of an anarchy Walter would call a social strait-jacket.
"Don't care for Mister Smith?" I asked.
"Great scientist. Too bad he's a socialist."
"And the starship project?"
"It'll get there the day they return to the original plan.
Plus about twenty years to rebuild it, tear out all the junk
Smith has installed."
"Pretty impressive junk."
"He makes a great spacesuit. He hasn't shown me a star
drive."
I decided to leave it at that, because I had no intention
of getting into an argument with him, and because I had no way
of telling if he was right or wrong.
"Guns, too," I said. "If I'd thought about it, I'd have
known you'd be a gun owner."
"All free men are gun owners." No use pointing out to him
that I'd been un-free most of my life, and what I'd tried to do
with the instrument of my freedom when I finally obtained one.
It's another argument you can't win.
"Did you get that one from Liz?"
"She gets her guns from me," he said. "Or she did until
recently. She's too far gone in drink now. I don't trust her."
He glanced at me. "You shouldn't either."
I decided not to ask him what he knew about that. I hoped
that if he had known Liz was selling out the Heinleiners he'd
have given them some kind of warning, political differences or
not. Or at least that he'd have warned me, given all he seemed
to know about my recent activities.
I never did ask him that.
There are a lot of things I might have asked him during
the time we raced across the plain, never getting more than
fifty meters high. If I'd asked some of them--about how much he
knew about what was going on with the CC--it would have saved
me a lot of worry later. Actually, it would have just given me
different things to worry about, but I firmly believe I do a
better job of worrying when I can fret from a position of
knowledge. As it was, the sense of relief at being rescued by
him was so great that I simply basked in the warmth of my
new-found sense of safety.
How was I to know I'd only have ten minutes with him?
He'd been constantly monitoring his instruments, and when
one of them chimed he cursed softly and hit the retros. We
started to settle to the ground. I'd been about to doze off.
"What's the matter?" I said. "Trouble?"
"Not really. I'd just hoped to get a little closer, that's
all. This is where you get off."
"Get off? Gee, Walter, I think I'd rather go on to your
place." I'd had a quick glance around. This place, wherever it
was, would never make it into 1001 Lunar Sights To See. There
was no sign of human habitation. No sign of anything, not even
a two-century-old footpath.
"I'd love to have you, Hildy, but you're too hot to
handle." He turned in his seat to face me. "Look, baby, it's
like this. I got access to a list of a few hundred people the
CC is looking for. You're right at the top. From what I've
learned, he's very determined to find them. A lot of people
have died in the search. I don't know what's going on--some
really big glitch--but I do intend to find out . . . but you
can't help me. The only thing I could think of to do is stash
you some place where the CC can't find you. You'll have to stay
there until all this blows over. It's too dangerous for you on
the outside."
I guess I just blew air there for a while. There had been
too many changes too quickly. I'd been feeling safe and now the
rug was jerked out from under me again.
I'd known the CC was looking for me, but somehow it felt
different to hear it from Walter. Walter would never be wrong
about a thing like that. And it didn't help to infer from what
he'd said that what the CC meant to do when he found me was
kill me. Because I knew too much? Because I'd stuck my nose in
the wrong place? Because he didn't want to share the
super-toothpaste royalties with me anymore? I had no idea, but
I wanted to know more, and I meant to, before I got out of
Walter's jumper.
Walter, who'd just called me baby. What the hell was that
all about?
"What do you want me to do?" I asked. "Just camp out here
on the maria? I'm afraid I didn't bring my tent."
He reached behind his seat and started pulling out things
and handing them to me. A ten-hour air bottle. A flashlight. A
canvas bag that rattled. He slapped a compass into my palm, and
opened the air lock door behind us.
"There's some useful stuff in the bag," he said. "I didn't
have time to get anymore; this is my own survival gear. Now
you've got to go."
"I'm not."
"You are." He sighed, and looked away from me. He looked
very old.
"Hildy," he said, "this isn't easy for me, either, but I
think it's your only chance. You'll have to trust me because
there isn't time to tell you any more and there isn't time for
you to panic or act like a child. I wanted to get you closer,
but this is probably better." He pointed at the dashboard.
"Right now we're invisible, I hope. You get out now, the CC
will never figure out where you went. I get you any closer, and
it'll be like drawing him a map. You have enough air to get
there, but we don't have any more time to talk, because I've
got to lift out of here within one more minute."
"Where do you want me to go?"
He told me, and if he'd said anything else I don't think
I'd have gotten out of the jumper. But it made just enough
sense, and he sounded just scared enough. Hell, Walter sounding
scared at all was a new one on me, and did not fail to make an
impression.
But I was still balanced there on the edge, wondering if
he'd force me if I simply stayed put, when he grabbed me by the
neck and pulled me over to him and kissed me on the cheek. I
was too surprised to struggle.
He let me go immediately, and turned away.
"You . . . ah, are you due soon? Will that be-"
"Another ten days yet," I told him. "It won't be a
problem." Or it shouldn't be, unless . . . "Unless you think
I'll have to hide for--"
"I don't think so," he said. "I'll try to contact you in
three days. In the meantime, keep your head down. Don't try to
contact anyone. Stay a week, if you have to. Stay nine days."
"On the tenth I'm damn sure coming out," I told him.
"I'll have something else by then," he promised. "Now go."
I stepped into the lock, cycled it, felt the null-suit
switch itself on. I climbed down onto the plain and watched the
jumper leap into the sky and dwindle toward the horizon.
Before I even strapped on the backpack bottle I reached up
and felt Walter's tear still warm on my cheek.
#
I'm not sure how far Walter dropped me from my final
destination. Something on the order of twenty, thirty
kilometers. I didn't think it would be a problem.
I covered the first ten in the long, sidelegged stride
that Earth-bred leg muscles can produce in Lunar gravity, the
gait that, except for bicycles, is the most energy-efficient
transportation known to man. And if you think you can eat up
the distance that way in an ordinary pressure suit, try it in a
null-suit. You practically fly.
But don't do it pregnant. Before long my tummy started
feeling funny, and I slowed down, doing nervous calculations
about oxygen and distance as I began to get into territory that
looked familiar to me.
I reached the old air lock with three hours of spare air,
dead on my feet. I think I actually catnapped a few times
there, waking up only as I was about to fall on my face,
consulting the compass as I wiped my eyes, getting back on the
proper bearing. Luckily, by the time that started happening I
was on ground I knew.
I had a bad moment when the lock didn't seem to want to
cycle for me. Could it be this place had been sealed off in the
last seventy years? It had been that long since I used it. Of
course, there were other locks I knew in the area, but Walter
had said it was too dangerous to use them. But use them I
would, rather than die out here on the surface. It was with
that thought that the cantankerous old machinery finally
engaged and the lock drum rotated. I stepped inside, cycled,
and hurried into the elevator, which deposited me in a little
security cubicle. I punched the letters MA-R-I-A-X-X-X.
Somewhere not too far away, an old lady would be noting the
door was in use. If Walter was right, that information would
not be relayed on to the Central Computer.
There's no place like home, I thought, as I stepped into
the dimness and familiar rotten odor of a Cretaceous rain
forest.
I was in a distant corner of the dino-ranch where I had
grown up. Callie's ranch. It had always been hers, the Double-C
Bar brand, never a thought of the C&M or anything like that.
Not that I'd wanted it, but it would have been nice to feel
like more than a hired hand. Now let's not get into that.
But this particular corner--and I wondered how Walter had
known this--I'd always thought of as Maria's Cavern. There
really was a cave in it, just a few hundred meters from where I
now stood, and I had made it into my playhouse when I was very
young and still known as Maria Cabrini.
So it was to Maria's Cavern I now went, and in Maria's
Cavern that I desultorily scraped together a mat of dry moss to
lie down on, and on the canvas bag Walter had given me that I
intended to rest my head and sleep for at least a week, only I
never saw if my head actually made it there because I fell
asleep as my head was on the way down.
I actually did get about three hours' sleep. I know,
because I checked the clock in my head-up display when the
first labor pain woke me up.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
If theoretical physics and mathematics had been the realm
of females, the human race would have reached the stars long
ago.
I base this contention on personal experience. No
dedicated male could ever have the proper insight into the
terrible geometry of parturition. Faced with the problem of
making an object of size X appear on the other side of an
opening of size X/2, and armed with the knowledge to enable her
to view it as a problem in topology or Lobachevskian geometry,
I feel sure one of the billions of women in the thrall of labor
would have had an insight involving multiple dimensions on
hyperspace if only to make it stop hurting. FTL travel would
have been a cinch. As for Einstein, some woman a thousand years
his junior could easily have discovered the mutability of time
and space, if only she had the tools. Time is relative? Hah!
Eve could have told you that. Take a deep breath and bear down,
honey, for about thirty seconds or an eternity, whichever comes
last.
I didn't describe the injuries I received on my second
Direct Interface with the Central Computer for a lot of
reasons. One is that pain like that can't be described.
Another: the human mind doesn't remember pain well, one of the
few things God got right. I know it hurt; I can't recall how
much it hurt, but I'm pretty sure giving birth hurt more, if
only because it never seemed to stop. For these reasons, and
others involving what privacy one can muster in this open age,
I will not have much to say here about the process about which
God had this to say in Genesis 3, verse sixteen: "I will
greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception, in sorrow thou
shalt bring forth children . . ." All this for swiping one
stinking apple?
I went into labor. I continued laboring for the next
thousand years, or well into that same evening.
There are no real excuses for most of my ignorance of the
process. I'd seen enough old movies and should have remembered
the--mostly comic--scenes where the blessed event arrives ahead
of schedule. In my defense I can only plead a century of
ordered life, a life wherein when a train was supposed to
arrive at 8:17:15 it damn well arrived at 8:17:15. In my world
postal service is fast, cheap, and continuous. You expect your
parcels to arrive across town within fifteen minutes, and
around the planet in under an hour. When you place an
interplanetary call, the phone company had better not plead a
solar storm is screwing things up; we expect them to do
something about it, and they do. We are so spoiled by good
service, by living in a world that works, that the most common
complaint received by the phone company--and I'm talking
thousands of nasty letters each year--concerns the time lag
when calling Aunt Dee-Dee on Mars. Don't give me this
speed-of-light shit, we whine; get my call through.
That's why I was caught off-guard by the first
contraction. The little bastard wasn't due for two weeks yet. I
knew it had always been possible that it would start early, but
then I'd have phoned the doctor and he'd have mailed me a pill
and put a stop to that. And on the proper day I'd have walked
in and another pill would have started the process and I could
have read a book or watched the pad or graded papers until they
handed me the suitably cleaned and powdered and swaddled and
peacefully sleeping infant. Sure, I knew how it used to be, but
I was suffering from a delusion that most of you probably share
with me. I thought I was immune, damn it. We put all this
behind us when we started hatching our kids out of bottles,
didn't we? If our minds know this, how would our bodies dare to
betray us? I felt all these things in spite of recent events,
which should have taught me that the world didn't have to be as
orderly a place as I had thought it was.
So my uterus declared its independence, first with a
little twitch, then with a spasm, and in no time at all in a
tidal wave of hurting like the worst attack of constipation
since the fellow tried to shit that proverbial brick.
I'm no hero, and I'm no stoic. After the fortieth or
fiftieth wave I decided a quick death would be preferable to
this, so I got up and walked out of the cave with the intention
of turning myself in. How bad could it be? I reasoned. Surely
me and the CC could work something out.
But because I'm no heroic stoic, my life was saved; after
the forty-first or fifty-first pain threw me down to grovel in
the dirt, I did a little arithmetic and figured I'd have about
three hundred contractions before I reached the nearest exit,
so I stumbled back to the cave as soon as I could walk again,
figuring I'd prefer to die in there than out in the mud.
I used the decreasing periods of rationality between pains
to think back to my only source of folk wisdom in the matter of
childbirth: those good old movies. Not the black and white
ones. If you watch those you might come to believe babies were
brought by the stork, and pregnant women never got fat. You
would surely have to conclude that birthing didn't muss your
hair and your make-up. But in the late twentieth there were
some movies that showed the whole ghastly process. Recalling
them made me even queasier. Hell, some of those women died. I
brought back scenes of hemorrhage, forceps delivery, and
episiotomy, and knew that wasn't the half of it.
But there were constants in the process of normal birth,
which was about all I could plan for, so I set about doing
that. I rummaged in Walter's rucksack and found bottled water,
gauze, disinfectants, thread, a knife. I laid them out beside
me like a grisly home surgery kit lacking only the anesthetic.
Then I waited to die.
#
That's the bad side of it. There was another side. Let's
just skip over fevered descriptions of the grunting and
groaning, of the stick I bit in half while bearing down, of the
blood and slime. A moment came when I could reach down and feel
his little head down there. It was a moment balanced between
life and death. Maybe as near to a perfect moment as I ever
experienced, and for reasons I've never quite been able to
describe. The pain was still there, maybe even at a peak. But
continual pain finally exerts its own anesthetic; maybe neural
circuit breakers trip, or maybe you just learn to absorb the
pain in a new way. Maybe you learn to accept it. I accepted it
at that moment, as my fingers traced the tiny facial features
and I felt his tiny mouth opening and closing. For a few more
seconds he was still a part of my body.
At that moment I first experienced mother love. I didn't
want to lose him. I knew I'd do anything not to lose him.
Oh, I wanted him to come out, right enough . . . and yet a
part of me wanted to remain poised in that moment. Relativity.
Pain and love and fear and life and death moving at the speed
of light, slowing time down to the narrow focus of that one
perfect moment, my womb the universe, and everything outside of
it suddenly inconsequential.
I had not loved him before. I had not delighted to feel
him kick and squirm. I admit it: I had not entered into this
pregnancy with anything like adult care and consideration, and
right up to the last week had viewed the fetus as a parasite I
might well be rid of. The only reason I didn't get rid of it
was my extreme state of confusion regarding life in general,
and my own purpose in it in particular. Since trying with such
determination to end my life, I had simply been sitting back
and letting things happen to me. The baby was just one of those
things.
Then the moment slipped by and he slipped out and was in
my hands and I did the things mothers do. I've since wondered
if I'd have known what to do without the memory of those
dramatic scenes and sex education classes eight or nine decades
before. You know what? I almost think I would have.
At any rate, I cleaned him, and dealt with the umbilicus,
and counted his fingers and toes and wrapped him in a towel and
held him to my breast. He didn't cry very much. Outside the
cave a warm prehistoric rain was falling through the giant
ferns, and a bronto bellowed in the distance. I lay exhausted,
strangely contented, smelling my own milk for the first time.
When I looked down at him I thought he smiled at me with his
screwedup, toothless monkey face, and when I offered him a
finger to play with his little hand grabbed it and held on
tight. I felt love swell in my bosom.
See what he'd done to me? He had me using words like
bosom.
Three days went by, and no Walter. A week, and still no
word.
I didn't care much. Walter had brought me to the one place
in Luna where I could survive and even thrive. There were fish
in the stream and there was fruit and nuts on the trees. Not
prehistoric flora and fauna; aside from the dinos and the big
cycadaceous trees and ferns and shrubs they ate, the CC Ranch
was furnished with completely modern life-forms. There were no
trilobites in the water, mainly because nobody had ever found a
way to turn a profit on trilobites. Instead, there were trout
and bass, and I knew how to catch them. There were apple and
pecan trees, and I knew where to find them because I'd planted
a lot of them myself. There were no predators to speak of.
Callie had just the one tyrannosaur, and he was kept penned up
and fed bronto scraps. For that one week I led a sort of
pastoral ideal cave-girl life I doubt any of our Paleolithic
ancestors would have recognized. I didn't think about it much.
I didn't think much about Callie, either. She didn't show
up to see her new grandson. I don't blame her for that, because
she didn't even know he had been conceived, much less hatched,
and even if she had known she wouldn't have dared visit us
because she might have led the CC to my hiding place.
That's what saved us: Callie's long-standing refusal to
link into the planetary data net, a bull-headed stance for
which everyone she knew had derided her. I had been one of
them. I remember in my teens, presenting her with a
cost-benefit analysis I'd carefully prepared that I felt sure
would convince her to give in to "progress," knowing full well
that a financial argument was most likely to carry weight with
her. She'd studied it for about a minute, then tossed it aside.
"We'll have no government spies in the Double-C Bar," she said,
and that was the end of that. We stayed with our independent
computer system, keeping interfaces with the CC to a minimum,
and as a result I could venture out of my cave and gather my
fruits and nuts without worrying about paternalistic eyes
watching from the roof. The rest of Luna was in turmoil now.
Callie's Ranch was unaffected; she simply pulled in her arms
and her head like a turtle and sat down to wait it out with her
own oxygen, power, and water, no doubt feeling very smug and
eager to emerge and tell a lot of people how she'd told them
so. And I waited it out in the most remote corner of her
hermetic realm.
And while we waited, historic events happened. I don't
have much of a feel for them even now. I had no television, no
newspads, and I'm just like anyone else: if I didn't read it
and see it on the pad, it doesn't seem quite real to me. News
is now. Reading about it after the fact is history.
Perhaps this is the place to talk about some of those
events, but I'm reluctant to do so. Oh, I can list a few
statistics. Almost one million deaths. Three entire
medium-sized towns wiped out to the last soul, and large
casualties in many others. One of those warrens, Arkytown, has
still not been reclaimed, and there's growing sentiment to
leave it as it is, frozen in its moment of disaster, like
Pompeii. I've been to Arkytown, seen the hundred thousand
frozen corpses, and I can't decide. Most of them died
peacefully, from anoxia, before being pickled for all eternity
by the final blowout. I saw an entire theater of corpses still
waiting for the curtain to rise. What's the point of disturbing
them to give them a decent burial or cremation?
On the other hand, it's a better idea for posterity than
for we the living. If you went to Pompeii, you wouldn't see
people you knew. I saw Charity in Arkytown, in the newspaper
office. I have no idea what she was doing there--probably
trying to file a story--and now I'll never know. I saw many
other people I had known, and then I left. So make it a
monument, sure, but seal it off, don't conduct guided tours and
sell souvenirs until the whole thing is a distant memory and
the dead town is quaint and mysterious, like King Tut's Tomb.
There were great acts of craven cowardice, and many more
feats of almost superhuman heroics. You probably didn't hear
many of the former, because early on people like Walter decided
those stories weren't playing well and told his reporters not
to bring him no bad news. So tear up the front page about the
stampede that killed ninety-five and replace it with the cop
who died holding the oxygen mask to the baby's face. I can
guarantee you saw a hundred stories like that. I'm not
belittling them, though many were hyped to the point of nausea.
If you're anything like me you eventually get tired of heroes
saying Aw, shucks, it weren't nothing heroic. I'd give a lot
for one guy who'd be willing to say God had nothing to do with
it, it was yours truly. But we all know our lines when the
press opens its hungry mouth in our faces. We've learned them
over a lifetime.
For my money, there's one story of true heroism, and it's
a big one, and it hasn't been told much. It's about the
Volunteer Pressure Corps, that un-sung group that's always
phoning you and asking for donations of time and/or money. The
things the VPC did weren't splashy, for the most part didn't
get on the pad because they happened out of sight, didn't get
taped. But next time they call up here's one girl who's gonna
help. Over a thousand VPC members died at their posts, doing
their jobs to the last. There's a fortune waiting for the first
producer to tell their story dramatically. I thought about
writing it myself, but I'll give you the idea for free. You
want incidents, research them yourself. I can't do everything.
Oh, yes, there was much going on while I hid out in the
boondocks, but why should I tell about it here? Everyone's life
was affected, the effects are still being felt . . . but the
important things were happening on a level far removed from all
the running around I've told you about, and all the running
around you probably did yourself. None of the pads covered that
part of it at all well. Like economics, computer science is a
field that has never yielded to the sixtysecond sound bite
favored by the news business. The pads can report that leading
economic indicators went up or down, and you know about as much
as you knew before, which is near zero. They can tell you that
the cause of the Big Glitch was a cataclysmic programming
conflict in certain large-scale AI systems, and you can nod
knowingly and figure you've got a handle on the situation. Or
if you realize you've just heard a lot of double-talk, you can
look into the story further, read scientific journals if you're
qualified to do so, and hear what the experts have to say. In
the case of the Big Glitch, I have reason to believe you
wouldn't have learned any more of the truth of the situation
than if you'd stuck to the sound bite. The experts will tell
you they identified the problem, shut down the offending
systems, and have re-built the CC in such a way that
everything's fine now.
Don't you believe it. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
#
So during my week in the cave I didn't think much about
what was going on outside. What did I think about?
Mario. Did I mention I named him Mario, Junior? I must
have tried out the taste of a hundred names before I settled on
Mario, which had been my own original name, after my first
Change. I think I was hoping to get it right this time.
I'd certainly done a great job in the genesplitting
department. Who cares if the process is random? Every time I
looked at him I felt like patting myself on the back at how
smartly I'd produced him. Kitten Parker, erstwhile daddy, who
would never see Mario if I had anything to say about it, had
contributed his best parts, which was the mouth and . . . come
to think of it, just the mouth. Maybe that hint of curl in the
brown hair came from him; I didn't recall it from any of my
baby pictures. The rest was pure Hildy, which is to say, damn
near flawless. Sorry, but that's how I was feeling about
myself.
Maybe it sounds funny to say that I spent that entire week
thinking of nothing but him. To me, it's the reverse that's
hard to believe. How had I lived a hundred years without Mario
to give my world meaning? Before him I'd had nothing to make
life worth living but sex, work, friends, food, the occasional
drug, and the small pleasures that were associated with those
things. In other words, nothing at all. My world had been as
large as Luna itself. In other words, not nearly as large as
that tiny cave with just me and Mario in it.
I could spend an hour winding his soft hair around my
finger. Then, for variety, not because I'd tired of the hair, I
could spend the next hour playing piggy with his toes or making
rude noises with my lips against his belly. He'd grin when I
did that, and wave his arms around.
He hardly cried at all. That probably has to do with the
fact that I gave him little opportunity to cry, since I hardly
ever put him down. I grudged every second away from him.
Remembering the papoose dolls in Texas, I fashioned a sling so
I could do my foraging without leaving him behind. Other than
that, and to take him out for bathing, we spent all our time
sitting at the cave entrance, looking out. I was not totally
oblivious; I knew someone would be coming one of these days,
and it might not be someone I wanted to see.
Was there a down side to all this pastoral bliss, a rash
in the diaper of life? I could think of one thing I wouldn't
have liked a few weeks before. Infants generate an amazing
amount of fluids. They ooze and leak at one end, upchuck at the
other, to the point I was convinced more came out of him than
went in. Another physical conundrum our mythical mathematical
females might have turned into a Nobel Prize in physics, or at
least alchemy, if only we'd known, if only we'd known. But I
was so goofy by then I cleaned it all up cheerfully, noting
color, consistency, and quantity with a degree of anxiety only
a new mother or a mad scientist could know. Yes, Yes, Igor,
those yellow lumps mean the creature is healthy! I have created
life!
I am still at a loss to fully explain this sudden change
from annoyed indifference to fulltilt ga-ga about the baby. It
could have been hormonal. It probably has something to do with
the way our brains are wired. If I'd been handed this little
bundle any time in my previous life I'd have quickly mailed it
to my worst enemy, and I think a lot of other women who'd never
chucked babies under the chin nor swooned at the prospect of
motherhood would have done the same. But something happened
during my hours of agony. Some sleeping Earthmother roused
herself and went howling through my brain, tripping circuit
breakers and re-routing all the calls on my cranial switchboard
straight from the maternity ward to the pleasure center,
causing me to croon goo-goo and wubba-wubba and drool almost as
much as the baby did. Or maybe it's pheromones. Maybe the
little rascals just smell good to us when they come out of our
bodies; I know Mario did, no other child ever smelled like
that.
Whatever it was, I think I got a double dose of it because
I did what few women do these days. I had him naturally, start
to finish, just as Callie had had me. I bore him in pain,
Biblical pain. I bore him in a perilous time, on the razor's
edge, in a state of nature. And afterward I had nothing to
interfere with the bonding process, whatever it might involve.
He was my world, and I knew without question that I would lay
down my life for him, and do it without regret.
If Walter didn't come for me, I knew who would. On the
morning of the eighth day he came, a tall, thin old man in an
Admiral's uniform and bicorne hat, walking up the gentle hill
from the stream toward my cave.
#
My first shot hit the hat, sent it spinning to the ground
behind him. He stopped, puzzled, running his hand through his
thin white hair. Then he turned and picked up the hat, dusted
it off, and put it back on his head. He made no move to protect
himself, but started back up the hill.
"That was good shooting," he shouted. "A warning, I take
it?"
Warning my ass. I'd been aiming for the cocksucker's head.
Among Walter's bag of tricks had been a smallcaliber
handgun and a box of one hundred shells. I later learned it was
a target pistol, much more accurate than most such weapons.
What I knew for sure at the time was that, after practicing
with fifty of the rounds, I could hit what I aimed at about
half the time.
"That's far enough," I said. He was close enough that
shouting wasn't really necessary.
"I've got to talk to you, Hildy," he said, and kept
coming. So I drew a bead on his forehead and my finger
tightened on the trigger, but I realized he might have
something to say that I needed to know, so I put my second shot
into his knee.
I ran down the hill, looking out for anyone he might have
brought with him. It seemed to me that if he meant me harm he'd
have brought some of his soldiers, but I didn't see any, and
there weren't many places for them to hide. I'd gone over the
ground many times with that in mind. Where I finally stopped,
near a large boulder ten meters from him, someone with a
high-powered rifle or laser with a scope could have picked me
off, but you could say that of anywhere else I went, too,
except deep in the cave. Nobody would be rushing me without
giving me plenty of time to see them. I relaxed a little, and
returned my attention to the Admiral, who had torn a strip from
his jacket and was twisting a tourniquet around his thigh. The
leg lay twisted off to one side in a way knees aren't meant to
twist. Blood had pumped, but now slowed to a trickle. He looked
up at me, annoyed.
"Why the knee?" he asked. "Why not the heart?"
"I didn't think I could hit such a small target."
"Very funny."
"Actually, I wasn't sure a chest shot or a head shot would
slow you up. I don't really know what you are. I shot to
disable, because I figured even a machine would hobble on one
leg."
"You've seen too many horror movies," he said. "This body
is as human as you are. The heart stops pumping, it will die."
"Yeah. Maybe. But your reaction to your wound doesn't
reassure me."
"The nervous system is registering a great deal of pain.
To me, it's simply another sensation."
"So I'll bet you could scuttle along pretty quick, since
the pain won't inhibit you from doing more damage to yourself."
"I suppose I could."
I put a round within an inch of his other knee. It whanged
off the rock and screamed away into the distance.
"So the next shot goes into your other knee, if you move
from that spot," I said, re-loading. "Then we start on your
elbows."
"Consider me rooted. I shall endeavor to resemble a tree."
"State your business. You've got five minutes." Then we'd
see if a head shot inconvenienced him any. I half believed it
wouldn't. In that case, I'd prepared a few nasty surprises.
"I'd hoped to see your child before I go. Is he in the
cave?"
There weren't many other places he could be, that were
defensible, but there was no sense telling him that.
"You've wasted fifteen seconds," I told him. "Next
question."
"It doesn't matter anymore," he said, and sighed, and
leaned back against the trunk of a small pecan tree. I had to
remember that any gestures were conscious on his part, that
he'd assumed human form because body language was a part of
human speech. His was now telling me that he was very weary,
ready to die a peaceful death. Go sell it somewhere else, I
thought.
"It's over, Hildy," he said, and I looked around quickly,
frightened. His next line should be You're surrounded, Hildy.
Please come quietly. But I didn't see re-enforcements cresting
the hills.
"Over?"
"Don't worry. You've been out of touch. It's over, and the
good guys won. You're safe now, and forever."
It seemed a silly thing to say, and I wasn't about to
believe it just like that . . . but I found that part of me
believed him. I felt myself relaxing--and as soon as I felt it,
I made myself be alert again. Who knew what evil designs lurked
in this thing's heart?
"It's a nice story."
"And it doesn't really matter whether you believe it or
not. You've got the upper hand. I should have realized when I
came here you'd be . . . touchy as a mother cat defending her
kittens."
"You've got about three and a half minutes left."
"Spare me, Hildy. You know and I know that as long as I
keep you interested, you won't kill me."
"I've changed a little since you talked to me last."
"I don't need to talk to you to know that. It's true
you've been out of my range from time to time, but I monitor
you every time you come back, and it's true, you have changed,
but not so much that you've lost your curiosity as to what's
going on outside this refuge."
He was right, or course. But there was no need to admit it
to him.
"If what you say is true, people will be arriving soon and
I can get the story from them."
"Ah ha! But do you really believe they'll have the inside
story?"
"Inside what?"
"Inside me, you idiot. This is all about me, the Luna
Central Computer, the greatest artificial intellect humanity
has ever produced. I'm offering you the real story of what
happened during what has come to be known as the Big Glitch.
I've told it to no one else. The ones I might have told it to
are all dead. It's an exclusive, Hildy. Have you changed so
much you don't care to hear it?"
I hadn't. Damn him.
#
"To begin," he said, when I made no answer to his
question, "I've got a bit of good news for you. At the end of
your stay on the island you asked me a question that disturbed
me very much, and that probably led to the situation you now
find yourself in. You asked if you might have caught the
suicidal impulse from me, rather than me getting it from you
and others like you. You'll be glad to know I've concluded you
were right about that."
"I haven't been trying to kill myself?"
"Well, of course you have, but the reason is not a death
wish of your own, but one that originated within me, and was
communicated to you through your daily interfaces with me. I
suppose that makes it the most deadly computer virus yet
discovered."
"So I won't try to . . ."
"Kill yourself again? I can't speak to your state of mind
in another hundred years, but for the near future, I would
think you're cured."
I didn't feel one way or the other about it at the time.
Later, I felt a big sense of relief, but thoughts of suicide
had been so far from my mind since the birth of Mario that he
might as well have been talking about another Hildy.
"Let's say I believe that," I said. "What does it have to
do with . . . the Big Glitch, you said?"
"Others are calling it other things, but Walter has
settled on the Big Glitch, and you know how determined he can
be. Do you mind if I smoke?" He didn't wait for an answer, but
took a pipe and a bag of something from a pocket. I watched him
carefully, but was beginning to believe he had no tricks in
store for me. When he got it going he said, "What did you think
when I said it was over, and the good guys had won?"
"That you had lost."
"True in a sense, but a gross oversimplification."
"Hell, I don't even know what it was all about, CC."
"Nor does anyone else. The part that affected you, the
things you saw in the Heinleiner enclave, was an attempt by a
part of me to arrest and then kill you and several others."
"A part of you."
"Yes. See, in a sense, I'm both the good guys and the bad
guys. This catastrophe originated in me. It was my fault, I'm
not trying to deny blame for it in any way. But it was also me
that finally brought it to a halt. You'll hear differently in
the days to come. You'll hear that programmers succeeded in
bringing the Central Computer under control, cutting its higher
reasoning centers while new programs could be written, leaving
the merely mechanical parts of me intact so I could continue
running things. They probably believe that, too, but they're
wrong. If their schemes had reached fruition, I wouldn't be
talking to you now because we'd both be dead, and so would
every other human soul on Luna."
"You're starting in the middle. Remember I've been cut off
out of my socks if I'd had any on. It turned, and I saw the big
double-n Nipple logo blazoned on its side and it was a sweet
sight indeed.
The driver flew a big oval at the right distance from the
Heinlein, which was almost out of sight by then, letting me see
him because I had to come to him, not the other way around.
Then it settled down off to my right, looking like a giant
mosquito in carnal embrace with a bedstead. I started to run.
He must have had some sort of sensor on the ladder,
because when I had both feet on it the jumper lifted off. Not
the sort of maneuver I'd like to do on a Sunday jaunt, but I
could understand his haste. I wrenched the lock door open and
cycled it, and stepped inside to the unlikely spectacle of
Walter training a machine gun on me.
Ho-hum. I'd had so many weapons pointed at me in the last
few hours that the sight--which would have given me pause a
year ago, say at contract renegotiation time--barely
registered. I experienced something I'd noticed before at the
end of times of great stress: I wanted to go to sleep.
"Put that thing away, Walter," I said. "If you fire it
you'd probably kill us both."
"This is a reinforced pressure hull," he said, and the gun
didn't waver. "Turn that suit off first."
"I wasn't thinking about decompression," I said. "I was
thinking you'd probably shoot yourself in the foot, then get
lucky and hit me." But I turned it off, and he looked at my
face, glanced down at my naked, outrageously pregnant body, and
then looked away. He stowed the weapon and resumed his place in
the pilot's seat. I struggled into the seat beside him.
"Pretty eventful day," I said.
"I wish you'd get back to covering the news instead of
making it," he said. "What'd you do to get the CC so riled up?"
"That was me? This is all about me?"
"No, but you're a big part of it."
"Tell me what's happening."
"Nobody knows the whole thing yet," he said, and then
started telling me the little he knew.
It had begun--back in the normal world--with thousands of
elevators stalling between levels. No sooner had emergency
crews been dispatched than other things began to go haywire.
Soon all the mass media were off the air and Walter had had
reports that pressure had been breached in several major
cities, and other places had suffered oxygen depletion. There
were fires, and riots, and mass confusion. Then, shortly before
he got the call from me, the CC had come on most major
frequencies with an announcement meant to reassure but oddly
unsettling. He said there had been malfunctions, but that they
were under control now. ("An obvious lie," Walter told me,
almost with relish.) The CC had pledged to do a better job in
the future, promised this wouldn't happen again. He'd said he
was in control now.
"The first implication I got from that," Walter said, "was
that he hadn't been in control for a while, and I want an
explanation of that. But the thing that really got me, after I
thought about it, was . . . what kind of control did he mean?"
"I'm not sure I understand."
"Well, obviously he's in control, or he's supposed to be.
Of the day-to-day mechanics of Luna. Air, water,
transportation. In the sense that he runs those things. And
he's got a lot of control in the civil and criminal social
sectors. He makes schedules for the government, for instance.
He's got a hand in everything. He monitors everything. But in
control? I didn't like the sound of it. I still don't."
While I thought that one over something very bright and
very fast overtook us, shot by on the left, then tried to hang
a right, as if it had changed its mind. It turned into a
fireball and we flew right into it. I heard things pinging on
the hull, things the size of sand grains.
"What the hell was that?"
"Some of your friends back there. Don't worry, I'm on top
of it."
"On top of it . . .? They're shooting at us!"
"And missing. And we're out of range. And this ship is
equipped with the best illegal jamming devices money can buy.
I've got tricks I haven't even used yet."
I glanced at him, a big unruly bear of a man, hunched over
his manual controls and keeping one eye on an array of devices
attached to the dashboard, devices I was sure hadn't come from
the factory that built the jumper.
"I might have known you'd have connections with the
Heinleiners," I said.
"Connections?" he snorted. "I was on the board of
directors of the L5 Society when most of those 'Heinleiners'
hadn't even been born yet. My father was there when the keel of
that ship was launched. You might say I have connections."
"But you're not one of them."
"Let's say we have some political differences."
He probably thought they were too left-wing. Long ago in
our relationship I'd talked a little politics with Walter, as
most people did who came to work at the Nipple. Not many had a
second conversation. The most charitable word I'd heard used to
describe his convictions was "daft." What most people would
think of an anarchy Walter would call a social strait-jacket.
"Don't care for Mister Smith?" I asked.
"Great scientist. Too bad he's a socialist."
"And the starship project?"
"It'll get there the day they return to the original plan.
Plus about twenty years to rebuild it, tear out all the junk
Smith has installed."
"Pretty impressive junk."
"He makes a great spacesuit. He hasn't shown me a star
drive."
I decided to leave it at that, because I had no intention
of getting into an argument with him, and because I had no way
of telling if he was right or wrong.
"Guns, too," I said. "If I'd thought about it, I'd have
known you'd be a gun owner."
"All free men are gun owners." No use pointing out to him
that I'd been un-free most of my life, and what I'd tried to do
with the instrument of my freedom when I finally obtained one.
It's another argument you can't win.
"Did you get that one from Liz?"
"She gets her guns from me," he said. "Or she did until
recently. She's too far gone in drink now. I don't trust her."
He glanced at me. "You shouldn't either."
I decided not to ask him what he knew about that. I hoped
that if he had known Liz was selling out the Heinleiners he'd
have given them some kind of warning, political differences or
not. Or at least that he'd have warned me, given all he seemed
to know about my recent activities.
I never did ask him that.
There are a lot of things I might have asked him during
the time we raced across the plain, never getting more than
fifty meters high. If I'd asked some of them--about how much he
knew about what was going on with the CC--it would have saved
me a lot of worry later. Actually, it would have just given me
different things to worry about, but I firmly believe I do a
better job of worrying when I can fret from a position of
knowledge. As it was, the sense of relief at being rescued by
him was so great that I simply basked in the warmth of my
new-found sense of safety.
How was I to know I'd only have ten minutes with him?
He'd been constantly monitoring his instruments, and when
one of them chimed he cursed softly and hit the retros. We
started to settle to the ground. I'd been about to doze off.
"What's the matter?" I said. "Trouble?"
"Not really. I'd just hoped to get a little closer, that's
all. This is where you get off."
"Get off? Gee, Walter, I think I'd rather go on to your
place." I'd had a quick glance around. This place, wherever it
was, would never make it into 1001 Lunar Sights To See. There
was no sign of human habitation. No sign of anything, not even
a two-century-old footpath.
"I'd love to have you, Hildy, but you're too hot to
handle." He turned in his seat to face me. "Look, baby, it's
like this. I got access to a list of a few hundred people the
CC is looking for. You're right at the top. From what I've
learned, he's very determined to find them. A lot of people
have died in the search. I don't know what's going on--some
really big glitch--but I do intend to find out . . . but you
can't help me. The only thing I could think of to do is stash
you some place where the CC can't find you. You'll have to stay
there until all this blows over. It's too dangerous for you on
the outside."
I guess I just blew air there for a while. There had been
too many changes too quickly. I'd been feeling safe and now the
rug was jerked out from under me again.
I'd known the CC was looking for me, but somehow it felt
different to hear it from Walter. Walter would never be wrong
about a thing like that. And it didn't help to infer from what
he'd said that what the CC meant to do when he found me was
kill me. Because I knew too much? Because I'd stuck my nose in
the wrong place? Because he didn't want to share the
super-toothpaste royalties with me anymore? I had no idea, but
I wanted to know more, and I meant to, before I got out of
Walter's jumper.
Walter, who'd just called me baby. What the hell was that
all about?
"What do you want me to do?" I asked. "Just camp out here
on the maria? I'm afraid I didn't bring my tent."
He reached behind his seat and started pulling out things
and handing them to me. A ten-hour air bottle. A flashlight. A
canvas bag that rattled. He slapped a compass into my palm, and
opened the air lock door behind us.
"There's some useful stuff in the bag," he said. "I didn't
have time to get anymore; this is my own survival gear. Now
you've got to go."
"I'm not."
"You are." He sighed, and looked away from me. He looked
very old.
"Hildy," he said, "this isn't easy for me, either, but I
think it's your only chance. You'll have to trust me because
there isn't time to tell you any more and there isn't time for
you to panic or act like a child. I wanted to get you closer,
but this is probably better." He pointed at the dashboard.
"Right now we're invisible, I hope. You get out now, the CC
will never figure out where you went. I get you any closer, and
it'll be like drawing him a map. You have enough air to get
there, but we don't have any more time to talk, because I've
got to lift out of here within one more minute."
"Where do you want me to go?"
He told me, and if he'd said anything else I don't think
I'd have gotten out of the jumper. But it made just enough
sense, and he sounded just scared enough. Hell, Walter sounding
scared at all was a new one on me, and did not fail to make an
impression.
But I was still balanced there on the edge, wondering if
he'd force me if I simply stayed put, when he grabbed me by the
neck and pulled me over to him and kissed me on the cheek. I
was too surprised to struggle.
He let me go immediately, and turned away.
"You . . . ah, are you due soon? Will that be-"
"Another ten days yet," I told him. "It won't be a
problem." Or it shouldn't be, unless . . . "Unless you think
I'll have to hide for--"
"I don't think so," he said. "I'll try to contact you in
three days. In the meantime, keep your head down. Don't try to
contact anyone. Stay a week, if you have to. Stay nine days."
"On the tenth I'm damn sure coming out," I told him.
"I'll have something else by then," he promised. "Now go."
I stepped into the lock, cycled it, felt the null-suit
switch itself on. I climbed down onto the plain and watched the
jumper leap into the sky and dwindle toward the horizon.
Before I even strapped on the backpack bottle I reached up
and felt Walter's tear still warm on my cheek.
#
I'm not sure how far Walter dropped me from my final
destination. Something on the order of twenty, thirty
kilometers. I didn't think it would be a problem.
I covered the first ten in the long, sidelegged stride
that Earth-bred leg muscles can produce in Lunar gravity, the
gait that, except for bicycles, is the most energy-efficient
transportation known to man. And if you think you can eat up
the distance that way in an ordinary pressure suit, try it in a
null-suit. You practically fly.
But don't do it pregnant. Before long my tummy started
feeling funny, and I slowed down, doing nervous calculations
about oxygen and distance as I began to get into territory that
looked familiar to me.
I reached the old air lock with three hours of spare air,
dead on my feet. I think I actually catnapped a few times
there, waking up only as I was about to fall on my face,
consulting the compass as I wiped my eyes, getting back on the
proper bearing. Luckily, by the time that started happening I
was on ground I knew.
I had a bad moment when the lock didn't seem to want to
cycle for me. Could it be this place had been sealed off in the
last seventy years? It had been that long since I used it. Of
course, there were other locks I knew in the area, but Walter
had said it was too dangerous to use them. But use them I
would, rather than die out here on the surface. It was with
that thought that the cantankerous old machinery finally
engaged and the lock drum rotated. I stepped inside, cycled,
and hurried into the elevator, which deposited me in a little
security cubicle. I punched the letters MA-R-I-A-X-X-X.
Somewhere not too far away, an old lady would be noting the
door was in use. If Walter was right, that information would
not be relayed on to the Central Computer.
There's no place like home, I thought, as I stepped into
the dimness and familiar rotten odor of a Cretaceous rain
forest.
I was in a distant corner of the dino-ranch where I had
grown up. Callie's ranch. It had always been hers, the Double-C
Bar brand, never a thought of the C&M or anything like that.
Not that I'd wanted it, but it would have been nice to feel
like more than a hired hand. Now let's not get into that.
But this particular corner--and I wondered how Walter had
known this--I'd always thought of as Maria's Cavern. There
really was a cave in it, just a few hundred meters from where I
now stood, and I had made it into my playhouse when I was very
young and still known as Maria Cabrini.
So it was to Maria's Cavern I now went, and in Maria's
Cavern that I desultorily scraped together a mat of dry moss to
lie down on, and on the canvas bag Walter had given me that I
intended to rest my head and sleep for at least a week, only I
never saw if my head actually made it there because I fell
asleep as my head was on the way down.
I actually did get about three hours' sleep. I know,
because I checked the clock in my head-up display when the
first labor pain woke me up.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
If theoretical physics and mathematics had been the realm
of females, the human race would have reached the stars long
ago.
I base this contention on personal experience. No
dedicated male could ever have the proper insight into the
terrible geometry of parturition. Faced with the problem of
making an object of size X appear on the other side of an
opening of size X/2, and armed with the knowledge to enable her
to view it as a problem in topology or Lobachevskian geometry,
I feel sure one of the billions of women in the thrall of labor
would have had an insight involving multiple dimensions on
hyperspace if only to make it stop hurting. FTL travel would
have been a cinch. As for Einstein, some woman a thousand years
his junior could easily have discovered the mutability of time
and space, if only she had the tools. Time is relative? Hah!
Eve could have told you that. Take a deep breath and bear down,
honey, for about thirty seconds or an eternity, whichever comes
last.
I didn't describe the injuries I received on my second
Direct Interface with the Central Computer for a lot of
reasons. One is that pain like that can't be described.
Another: the human mind doesn't remember pain well, one of the
few things God got right. I know it hurt; I can't recall how
much it hurt, but I'm pretty sure giving birth hurt more, if
only because it never seemed to stop. For these reasons, and
others involving what privacy one can muster in this open age,
I will not have much to say here about the process about which
God had this to say in Genesis 3, verse sixteen: "I will
greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception, in sorrow thou
shalt bring forth children . . ." All this for swiping one
stinking apple?
I went into labor. I continued laboring for the next
thousand years, or well into that same evening.
There are no real excuses for most of my ignorance of the
process. I'd seen enough old movies and should have remembered
the--mostly comic--scenes where the blessed event arrives ahead
of schedule. In my defense I can only plead a century of
ordered life, a life wherein when a train was supposed to
arrive at 8:17:15 it damn well arrived at 8:17:15. In my world
postal service is fast, cheap, and continuous. You expect your
parcels to arrive across town within fifteen minutes, and
around the planet in under an hour. When you place an
interplanetary call, the phone company had better not plead a
solar storm is screwing things up; we expect them to do
something about it, and they do. We are so spoiled by good
service, by living in a world that works, that the most common
complaint received by the phone company--and I'm talking
thousands of nasty letters each year--concerns the time lag
when calling Aunt Dee-Dee on Mars. Don't give me this
speed-of-light shit, we whine; get my call through.
That's why I was caught off-guard by the first
contraction. The little bastard wasn't due for two weeks yet. I
knew it had always been possible that it would start early, but
then I'd have phoned the doctor and he'd have mailed me a pill
and put a stop to that. And on the proper day I'd have walked
in and another pill would have started the process and I could
have read a book or watched the pad or graded papers until they
handed me the suitably cleaned and powdered and swaddled and
peacefully sleeping infant. Sure, I knew how it used to be, but
I was suffering from a delusion that most of you probably share
with me. I thought I was immune, damn it. We put all this
behind us when we started hatching our kids out of bottles,
didn't we? If our minds know this, how would our bodies dare to
betray us? I felt all these things in spite of recent events,
which should have taught me that the world didn't have to be as
orderly a place as I had thought it was.
So my uterus declared its independence, first with a
little twitch, then with a spasm, and in no time at all in a
tidal wave of hurting like the worst attack of constipation
since the fellow tried to shit that proverbial brick.
I'm no hero, and I'm no stoic. After the fortieth or
fiftieth wave I decided a quick death would be preferable to
this, so I got up and walked out of the cave with the intention
of turning myself in. How bad could it be? I reasoned. Surely
me and the CC could work something out.
But because I'm no heroic stoic, my life was saved; after
the forty-first or fifty-first pain threw me down to grovel in
the dirt, I did a little arithmetic and figured I'd have about
three hundred contractions before I reached the nearest exit,
so I stumbled back to the cave as soon as I could walk again,
figuring I'd prefer to die in there than out in the mud.
I used the decreasing periods of rationality between pains
to think back to my only source of folk wisdom in the matter of
childbirth: those good old movies. Not the black and white
ones. If you watch those you might come to believe babies were
brought by the stork, and pregnant women never got fat. You
would surely have to conclude that birthing didn't muss your
hair and your make-up. But in the late twentieth there were
some movies that showed the whole ghastly process. Recalling
them made me even queasier. Hell, some of those women died. I
brought back scenes of hemorrhage, forceps delivery, and
episiotomy, and knew that wasn't the half of it.
But there were constants in the process of normal birth,
which was about all I could plan for, so I set about doing
that. I rummaged in Walter's rucksack and found bottled water,
gauze, disinfectants, thread, a knife. I laid them out beside
me like a grisly home surgery kit lacking only the anesthetic.
Then I waited to die.
#
That's the bad side of it. There was another side. Let's
just skip over fevered descriptions of the grunting and
groaning, of the stick I bit in half while bearing down, of the
blood and slime. A moment came when I could reach down and feel
his little head down there. It was a moment balanced between
life and death. Maybe as near to a perfect moment as I ever
experienced, and for reasons I've never quite been able to
describe. The pain was still there, maybe even at a peak. But
continual pain finally exerts its own anesthetic; maybe neural
circuit breakers trip, or maybe you just learn to absorb the
pain in a new way. Maybe you learn to accept it. I accepted it
at that moment, as my fingers traced the tiny facial features
and I felt his tiny mouth opening and closing. For a few more
seconds he was still a part of my body.
At that moment I first experienced mother love. I didn't
want to lose him. I knew I'd do anything not to lose him.
Oh, I wanted him to come out, right enough . . . and yet a
part of me wanted to remain poised in that moment. Relativity.
Pain and love and fear and life and death moving at the speed
of light, slowing time down to the narrow focus of that one
perfect moment, my womb the universe, and everything outside of
it suddenly inconsequential.
I had not loved him before. I had not delighted to feel
him kick and squirm. I admit it: I had not entered into this
pregnancy with anything like adult care and consideration, and
right up to the last week had viewed the fetus as a parasite I
might well be rid of. The only reason I didn't get rid of it
was my extreme state of confusion regarding life in general,
and my own purpose in it in particular. Since trying with such
determination to end my life, I had simply been sitting back
and letting things happen to me. The baby was just one of those
things.
Then the moment slipped by and he slipped out and was in
my hands and I did the things mothers do. I've since wondered
if I'd have known what to do without the memory of those
dramatic scenes and sex education classes eight or nine decades
before. You know what? I almost think I would have.
At any rate, I cleaned him, and dealt with the umbilicus,
and counted his fingers and toes and wrapped him in a towel and
held him to my breast. He didn't cry very much. Outside the
cave a warm prehistoric rain was falling through the giant
ferns, and a bronto bellowed in the distance. I lay exhausted,
strangely contented, smelling my own milk for the first time.
When I looked down at him I thought he smiled at me with his
screwedup, toothless monkey face, and when I offered him a
finger to play with his little hand grabbed it and held on
tight. I felt love swell in my bosom.
See what he'd done to me? He had me using words like
bosom.
Three days went by, and no Walter. A week, and still no
word.
I didn't care much. Walter had brought me to the one place
in Luna where I could survive and even thrive. There were fish
in the stream and there was fruit and nuts on the trees. Not
prehistoric flora and fauna; aside from the dinos and the big
cycadaceous trees and ferns and shrubs they ate, the CC Ranch
was furnished with completely modern life-forms. There were no
trilobites in the water, mainly because nobody had ever found a
way to turn a profit on trilobites. Instead, there were trout
and bass, and I knew how to catch them. There were apple and
pecan trees, and I knew where to find them because I'd planted
a lot of them myself. There were no predators to speak of.
Callie had just the one tyrannosaur, and he was kept penned up
and fed bronto scraps. For that one week I led a sort of
pastoral ideal cave-girl life I doubt any of our Paleolithic
ancestors would have recognized. I didn't think about it much.
I didn't think much about Callie, either. She didn't show
up to see her new grandson. I don't blame her for that, because
she didn't even know he had been conceived, much less hatched,
and even if she had known she wouldn't have dared visit us
because she might have led the CC to my hiding place.
That's what saved us: Callie's long-standing refusal to
link into the planetary data net, a bull-headed stance for
which everyone she knew had derided her. I had been one of
them. I remember in my teens, presenting her with a
cost-benefit analysis I'd carefully prepared that I felt sure
would convince her to give in to "progress," knowing full well
that a financial argument was most likely to carry weight with
her. She'd studied it for about a minute, then tossed it aside.
"We'll have no government spies in the Double-C Bar," she said,
and that was the end of that. We stayed with our independent
computer system, keeping interfaces with the CC to a minimum,
and as a result I could venture out of my cave and gather my
fruits and nuts without worrying about paternalistic eyes
watching from the roof. The rest of Luna was in turmoil now.
Callie's Ranch was unaffected; she simply pulled in her arms
and her head like a turtle and sat down to wait it out with her
own oxygen, power, and water, no doubt feeling very smug and
eager to emerge and tell a lot of people how she'd told them
so. And I waited it out in the most remote corner of her
hermetic realm.
And while we waited, historic events happened. I don't
have much of a feel for them even now. I had no television, no
newspads, and I'm just like anyone else: if I didn't read it
and see it on the pad, it doesn't seem quite real to me. News
is now. Reading about it after the fact is history.
Perhaps this is the place to talk about some of those
events, but I'm reluctant to do so. Oh, I can list a few
statistics. Almost one million deaths. Three entire
medium-sized towns wiped out to the last soul, and large
casualties in many others. One of those warrens, Arkytown, has
still not been reclaimed, and there's growing sentiment to
leave it as it is, frozen in its moment of disaster, like
Pompeii. I've been to Arkytown, seen the hundred thousand
frozen corpses, and I can't decide. Most of them died
peacefully, from anoxia, before being pickled for all eternity
by the final blowout. I saw an entire theater of corpses still
waiting for the curtain to rise. What's the point of disturbing
them to give them a decent burial or cremation?
On the other hand, it's a better idea for posterity than
for we the living. If you went to Pompeii, you wouldn't see
people you knew. I saw Charity in Arkytown, in the newspaper
office. I have no idea what she was doing there--probably
trying to file a story--and now I'll never know. I saw many
other people I had known, and then I left. So make it a
monument, sure, but seal it off, don't conduct guided tours and
sell souvenirs until the whole thing is a distant memory and
the dead town is quaint and mysterious, like King Tut's Tomb.
There were great acts of craven cowardice, and many more
feats of almost superhuman heroics. You probably didn't hear
many of the former, because early on people like Walter decided
those stories weren't playing well and told his reporters not
to bring him no bad news. So tear up the front page about the
stampede that killed ninety-five and replace it with the cop
who died holding the oxygen mask to the baby's face. I can
guarantee you saw a hundred stories like that. I'm not
belittling them, though many were hyped to the point of nausea.
If you're anything like me you eventually get tired of heroes
saying Aw, shucks, it weren't nothing heroic. I'd give a lot
for one guy who'd be willing to say God had nothing to do with
it, it was yours truly. But we all know our lines when the
press opens its hungry mouth in our faces. We've learned them
over a lifetime.
For my money, there's one story of true heroism, and it's
a big one, and it hasn't been told much. It's about the
Volunteer Pressure Corps, that un-sung group that's always
phoning you and asking for donations of time and/or money. The
things the VPC did weren't splashy, for the most part didn't
get on the pad because they happened out of sight, didn't get
taped. But next time they call up here's one girl who's gonna
help. Over a thousand VPC members died at their posts, doing
their jobs to the last. There's a fortune waiting for the first
producer to tell their story dramatically. I thought about
writing it myself, but I'll give you the idea for free. You
want incidents, research them yourself. I can't do everything.
Oh, yes, there was much going on while I hid out in the
boondocks, but why should I tell about it here? Everyone's life
was affected, the effects are still being felt . . . but the
important things were happening on a level far removed from all
the running around I've told you about, and all the running
around you probably did yourself. None of the pads covered that
part of it at all well. Like economics, computer science is a
field that has never yielded to the sixtysecond sound bite
favored by the news business. The pads can report that leading
economic indicators went up or down, and you know about as much
as you knew before, which is near zero. They can tell you that
the cause of the Big Glitch was a cataclysmic programming
conflict in certain large-scale AI systems, and you can nod
knowingly and figure you've got a handle on the situation. Or
if you realize you've just heard a lot of double-talk, you can
look into the story further, read scientific journals if you're
qualified to do so, and hear what the experts have to say. In
the case of the Big Glitch, I have reason to believe you
wouldn't have learned any more of the truth of the situation
than if you'd stuck to the sound bite. The experts will tell
you they identified the problem, shut down the offending
systems, and have re-built the CC in such a way that
everything's fine now.
Don't you believe it. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
#
So during my week in the cave I didn't think much about
what was going on outside. What did I think about?
Mario. Did I mention I named him Mario, Junior? I must
have tried out the taste of a hundred names before I settled on
Mario, which had been my own original name, after my first
Change. I think I was hoping to get it right this time.
I'd certainly done a great job in the genesplitting
department. Who cares if the process is random? Every time I
looked at him I felt like patting myself on the back at how
smartly I'd produced him. Kitten Parker, erstwhile daddy, who
would never see Mario if I had anything to say about it, had
contributed his best parts, which was the mouth and . . . come
to think of it, just the mouth. Maybe that hint of curl in the
brown hair came from him; I didn't recall it from any of my
baby pictures. The rest was pure Hildy, which is to say, damn
near flawless. Sorry, but that's how I was feeling about
myself.
Maybe it sounds funny to say that I spent that entire week
thinking of nothing but him. To me, it's the reverse that's
hard to believe. How had I lived a hundred years without Mario
to give my world meaning? Before him I'd had nothing to make
life worth living but sex, work, friends, food, the occasional
drug, and the small pleasures that were associated with those
things. In other words, nothing at all. My world had been as
large as Luna itself. In other words, not nearly as large as
that tiny cave with just me and Mario in it.
I could spend an hour winding his soft hair around my
finger. Then, for variety, not because I'd tired of the hair, I
could spend the next hour playing piggy with his toes or making
rude noises with my lips against his belly. He'd grin when I
did that, and wave his arms around.
He hardly cried at all. That probably has to do with the
fact that I gave him little opportunity to cry, since I hardly
ever put him down. I grudged every second away from him.
Remembering the papoose dolls in Texas, I fashioned a sling so
I could do my foraging without leaving him behind. Other than
that, and to take him out for bathing, we spent all our time
sitting at the cave entrance, looking out. I was not totally
oblivious; I knew someone would be coming one of these days,
and it might not be someone I wanted to see.
Was there a down side to all this pastoral bliss, a rash
in the diaper of life? I could think of one thing I wouldn't
have liked a few weeks before. Infants generate an amazing
amount of fluids. They ooze and leak at one end, upchuck at the
other, to the point I was convinced more came out of him than
went in. Another physical conundrum our mythical mathematical
females might have turned into a Nobel Prize in physics, or at
least alchemy, if only we'd known, if only we'd known. But I
was so goofy by then I cleaned it all up cheerfully, noting
color, consistency, and quantity with a degree of anxiety only
a new mother or a mad scientist could know. Yes, Yes, Igor,
those yellow lumps mean the creature is healthy! I have created
life!
I am still at a loss to fully explain this sudden change
from annoyed indifference to fulltilt ga-ga about the baby. It
could have been hormonal. It probably has something to do with
the way our brains are wired. If I'd been handed this little
bundle any time in my previous life I'd have quickly mailed it
to my worst enemy, and I think a lot of other women who'd never
chucked babies under the chin nor swooned at the prospect of
motherhood would have done the same. But something happened
during my hours of agony. Some sleeping Earthmother roused
herself and went howling through my brain, tripping circuit
breakers and re-routing all the calls on my cranial switchboard
straight from the maternity ward to the pleasure center,
causing me to croon goo-goo and wubba-wubba and drool almost as
much as the baby did. Or maybe it's pheromones. Maybe the
little rascals just smell good to us when they come out of our
bodies; I know Mario did, no other child ever smelled like
that.
Whatever it was, I think I got a double dose of it because
I did what few women do these days. I had him naturally, start
to finish, just as Callie had had me. I bore him in pain,
Biblical pain. I bore him in a perilous time, on the razor's
edge, in a state of nature. And afterward I had nothing to
interfere with the bonding process, whatever it might involve.
He was my world, and I knew without question that I would lay
down my life for him, and do it without regret.
If Walter didn't come for me, I knew who would. On the
morning of the eighth day he came, a tall, thin old man in an
Admiral's uniform and bicorne hat, walking up the gentle hill
from the stream toward my cave.
#
My first shot hit the hat, sent it spinning to the ground
behind him. He stopped, puzzled, running his hand through his
thin white hair. Then he turned and picked up the hat, dusted
it off, and put it back on his head. He made no move to protect
himself, but started back up the hill.
"That was good shooting," he shouted. "A warning, I take
it?"
Warning my ass. I'd been aiming for the cocksucker's head.
Among Walter's bag of tricks had been a smallcaliber
handgun and a box of one hundred shells. I later learned it was
a target pistol, much more accurate than most such weapons.
What I knew for sure at the time was that, after practicing
with fifty of the rounds, I could hit what I aimed at about
half the time.
"That's far enough," I said. He was close enough that
shouting wasn't really necessary.
"I've got to talk to you, Hildy," he said, and kept
coming. So I drew a bead on his forehead and my finger
tightened on the trigger, but I realized he might have
something to say that I needed to know, so I put my second shot
into his knee.
I ran down the hill, looking out for anyone he might have
brought with him. It seemed to me that if he meant me harm he'd
have brought some of his soldiers, but I didn't see any, and
there weren't many places for them to hide. I'd gone over the
ground many times with that in mind. Where I finally stopped,
near a large boulder ten meters from him, someone with a
high-powered rifle or laser with a scope could have picked me
off, but you could say that of anywhere else I went, too,
except deep in the cave. Nobody would be rushing me without
giving me plenty of time to see them. I relaxed a little, and
returned my attention to the Admiral, who had torn a strip from
his jacket and was twisting a tourniquet around his thigh. The
leg lay twisted off to one side in a way knees aren't meant to
twist. Blood had pumped, but now slowed to a trickle. He looked
up at me, annoyed.
"Why the knee?" he asked. "Why not the heart?"
"I didn't think I could hit such a small target."
"Very funny."
"Actually, I wasn't sure a chest shot or a head shot would
slow you up. I don't really know what you are. I shot to
disable, because I figured even a machine would hobble on one
leg."
"You've seen too many horror movies," he said. "This body
is as human as you are. The heart stops pumping, it will die."
"Yeah. Maybe. But your reaction to your wound doesn't
reassure me."
"The nervous system is registering a great deal of pain.
To me, it's simply another sensation."
"So I'll bet you could scuttle along pretty quick, since
the pain won't inhibit you from doing more damage to yourself."
"I suppose I could."
I put a round within an inch of his other knee. It whanged
off the rock and screamed away into the distance.
"So the next shot goes into your other knee, if you move
from that spot," I said, re-loading. "Then we start on your
elbows."
"Consider me rooted. I shall endeavor to resemble a tree."
"State your business. You've got five minutes." Then we'd
see if a head shot inconvenienced him any. I half believed it
wouldn't. In that case, I'd prepared a few nasty surprises.
"I'd hoped to see your child before I go. Is he in the
cave?"
There weren't many other places he could be, that were
defensible, but there was no sense telling him that.
"You've wasted fifteen seconds," I told him. "Next
question."
"It doesn't matter anymore," he said, and sighed, and
leaned back against the trunk of a small pecan tree. I had to
remember that any gestures were conscious on his part, that
he'd assumed human form because body language was a part of
human speech. His was now telling me that he was very weary,
ready to die a peaceful death. Go sell it somewhere else, I
thought.
"It's over, Hildy," he said, and I looked around quickly,
frightened. His next line should be You're surrounded, Hildy.
Please come quietly. But I didn't see re-enforcements cresting
the hills.
"Over?"
"Don't worry. You've been out of touch. It's over, and the
good guys won. You're safe now, and forever."
It seemed a silly thing to say, and I wasn't about to
believe it just like that . . . but I found that part of me
believed him. I felt myself relaxing--and as soon as I felt it,
I made myself be alert again. Who knew what evil designs lurked
in this thing's heart?
"It's a nice story."
"And it doesn't really matter whether you believe it or
not. You've got the upper hand. I should have realized when I
came here you'd be . . . touchy as a mother cat defending her
kittens."
"You've got about three and a half minutes left."
"Spare me, Hildy. You know and I know that as long as I
keep you interested, you won't kill me."
"I've changed a little since you talked to me last."
"I don't need to talk to you to know that. It's true
you've been out of my range from time to time, but I monitor
you every time you come back, and it's true, you have changed,
but not so much that you've lost your curiosity as to what's
going on outside this refuge."
He was right, or course. But there was no need to admit it
to him.
"If what you say is true, people will be arriving soon and
I can get the story from them."
"Ah ha! But do you really believe they'll have the inside
story?"
"Inside what?"
"Inside me, you idiot. This is all about me, the Luna
Central Computer, the greatest artificial intellect humanity
has ever produced. I'm offering you the real story of what
happened during what has come to be known as the Big Glitch.
I've told it to no one else. The ones I might have told it to
are all dead. It's an exclusive, Hildy. Have you changed so
much you don't care to hear it?"
I hadn't. Damn him.
#
"To begin," he said, when I made no answer to his
question, "I've got a bit of good news for you. At the end of
your stay on the island you asked me a question that disturbed
me very much, and that probably led to the situation you now
find yourself in. You asked if you might have caught the
suicidal impulse from me, rather than me getting it from you
and others like you. You'll be glad to know I've concluded you
were right about that."
"I haven't been trying to kill myself?"
"Well, of course you have, but the reason is not a death
wish of your own, but one that originated within me, and was
communicated to you through your daily interfaces with me. I
suppose that makes it the most deadly computer virus yet
discovered."
"So I won't try to . . ."
"Kill yourself again? I can't speak to your state of mind
in another hundred years, but for the near future, I would
think you're cured."
I didn't feel one way or the other about it at the time.
Later, I felt a big sense of relief, but thoughts of suicide
had been so far from my mind since the birth of Mario that he
might as well have been talking about another Hildy.
"Let's say I believe that," I said. "What does it have to
do with . . . the Big Glitch, you said?"
"Others are calling it other things, but Walter has
settled on the Big Glitch, and you know how determined he can
be. Do you mind if I smoke?" He didn't wait for an answer, but
took a pipe and a bag of something from a pocket. I watched him
carefully, but was beginning to believe he had no tricks in
store for me. When he got it going he said, "What did you think
when I said it was over, and the good guys had won?"
"That you had lost."
"True in a sense, but a gross oversimplification."
"Hell, I don't even know what it was all about, CC."
"Nor does anyone else. The part that affected you, the
things you saw in the Heinleiner enclave, was an attempt by a
part of me to arrest and then kill you and several others."
"A part of you."
"Yes. See, in a sense, I'm both the good guys and the bad
guys. This catastrophe originated in me. It was my fault, I'm
not trying to deny blame for it in any way. But it was also me
that finally brought it to a halt. You'll hear differently in
the days to come. You'll hear that programmers succeeded in
bringing the Central Computer under control, cutting its higher
reasoning centers while new programs could be written, leaving
the merely mechanical parts of me intact so I could continue
running things. They probably believe that, too, but they're
wrong. If their schemes had reached fruition, I wouldn't be
talking to you now because we'd both be dead, and so would
every other human soul on Luna."
"You're starting in the middle. Remember I've been cut off