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my world anymore, either, because of you. All of us, from both
generational extremes, have to run this world together, which
means we have to make the effort to understand each other's
viewpoints. It's hard for me, and I know it must be hard for
you. It's as if I had to live with my
great-great-great-great-grandparents, who grew up during the
industrial revolution and were ruled by kings. We'd barely even
have a language in common."
"That's okay with me," Brenda said. "I do make the effort.
Why doesn't he?"
"Don't worry about him. He's always been like that."
"Sometimes he makes me so mad."
"It's just his way."
"Yoo-hoo, ladies. I'm here."
"Shut up, Mario. I can read him like a book, and I can
tell he likes you. It's just that, the more he likes you, the
worse he tends to treat you. It's his way of distancing himself
from affection, which he's not sure he's able to return."
I could see the wheels turning in Brenda's head and, since
she was not stupid, just ignorant, she eventually followed that
statement out to its logical--if you believed the premise in
the first place--conclusion, which was that I must love her
madly, because I treated her very badly. I looked
ostentatiously around at the walls of the barn.
"It must be hanging in your office," I said.
"What's that?"
"Your degree in psychology. I didn't even know you went
back to school."
"I've been in school every day of my life, jerk. And I
sure wouldn't need a degree to see through you. I spent thirty
years learning how to do that." There was more, something about
how just because I was a hundred years old now, I shouldn't
think I'd changed so much. But it was all in Italian, so I only
got the gist.
Callie gets a modest yearly stipend from the Antiquities
Preservation Board for staying fluent in Italian--something she
would have done anyway, since it was her native language and
she had firm ideas about the extinction of human knowledge. She
had tried to teach it to me but I had no aptitude beyond a few
kitchen words. And what was the point? The Central Computer
stored hundreds of languages no one spoke anymore, from
Cheyenne to Tasmanian, including all the languages that had
suffered a drastic drop in popularity because they never got
established on Luna before the Invasion. I spoke English and
German, like most everybody else, with a little Japanese thrown
in. There were sizable groups of Chinese speakers, and Swahili,
and Russian. Other than that, languages were preserved by study
groups of a few hundred fanatics like Callie.
I doubt Brenda even knew there was an Italian language, so
she listened to Callie's tirade with a certain wariness. Ah,
yes, Italian is a fine language for tirades.
"I guess you've known each other a long time," Brenda said
to me.
"We go way back."
She nodded, unhappy about something. Callie shouted, and I
turned to see her jump down into the breeding pen and stride
toward the crew of helpers, who were chivying the two brutes
into final mating position.
"Not yet, you idiots," she shouted. "Give them time." She
reached the group of people and started handing out orders
right and left. Callie had never been able to find good help. I
had been part of that help for a great many years, so I know
what I'm talking about. It took me a long time to realize that
no one would ever be good enough for her; she was one of those
people who never believed anyone could do a job as well as she
could do it herself. The maddening thing was, she was usually
right.
"Back off, they're not ready yet. Don't rush them. They'll
know when it's time. Our job is to facilitate, not initiate."If
I have any skills as a lover," I told Brenda, "it's because of
that."
"Because of her?"
"'Give them time. We're not on a schedule here. Show a
little finesse.' I heard that so many times I guess I took it
to heart."
And it did take me back, watching Callie working the stock
again. Of the major brontosaur ranchers in Luna, she was the
only one who didn't use artificial insemination at breeding
time. "If you think helping a pair copulate is tough," she
always said, "try getting a semen sample from a brontosaur
bull."
And there was a rough sort of poetry about dinosaur
mating, particularly brontosaurs.
Tyrannosaurs went about it as you might expect, full of
sound and fury. Two bulls would butt heads over a prospective
mate until one staggered away like a dusted-up nerg addict to
nurse an epic headache. I don't suppose the victor fared a lot
better except for the chance to grapple the tiny claw of his
lady fair.
Brontosaurs were more dainty. The male would spend three
or four days doing his dance, when he remembered to. These
creatures had short attention spans, even when in heat. He
would rear up on his hind legs and do a comical samba around
and around the female. She typically showed minimal interest
for the first two days. Then the seduction moved to the
love-bite stage, with the male nipping her around the base of
the tail while she placidly chewed her cud. When she finally
began rearing up with him, it was time to bring them into the
mating pen to pitch some serious woo.
That was going on now. The two of them were facing each
other on their hind legs, doing a little neck-weaving, a little
foreleg pawing. It could still be another hour before they were
ready, a condition signaled by the emergence of one of the
bull's two hemi-penes.
Nobody ever told me why a reptile needs two penises. Come
to think of it, I never asked. There are limits to curiosity.
"So how long were you involved with Callie?"
"What's that?" Brenda had drawn me out of my reverie, as
she had a habit of doing.
"She said thirty years. That's a long time. You must have
been real serious about her."
All right, so I'm dense. But I finally got it. I looked
out at the primal scene: two Mesozoic monsters, here through
the grace of modern genetic science, and a thin brown woman,
likewise.
"She's not my lover. She's my mother. Why don't you go
down there with her? She'll see you don't get hurt, and I'm
sure she'll be happy to tell you more than you ever wanted to
know about brontosaurs. I'm going to take a break."
I noticed as we climbed down the gate on opposite sides
that Brenda looked happier than I'd seen her all day.
#
I assume the mating went off without any trouble. It
usually does when Callie's in charge. I imagine the mating that
produced me was equally well-planned and carried out. Sex was
never a big deal to Callie. Having me was her nod in the
direction of duty. But I have no siblings, despite powerful
societal pressure toward large families at the time of my
birth. Once was apparently enough.
Paradoxically, I know I didn't spend any time in a Petri
dish, though it would have made the whole process much easier
for her if she'd availed herself of any of the medical advances
that could, today, make procreation, gestation, and parturition
about as personally involving as a wrong number on the
telephone. Callie had conceived me the old-fashioned way: a
random spermatozoan hitting the jackpot at the right time of
the month. She had carried me to full term, and had borne me in
pain, just like God promised Eve. And she had hated every
minute of it. How do I know that? She told me, and anyone else
who would listen. She told me an average of three times a day
throughout my childhood.
It wasn't so much the pain that had bothered her. For a
woman who could shoulder a reproductive organ almost as big as
she was and guide it into a cloaca of a filthiness that had to
be seen to be disbelieved, while standing kneedeep in dinosaur
droppings, Callie had an amazing streak of prissiness. She had
hated the bloodiness of childbirth, the smells and sensations
of it.
#
Callie's office was cool. That's what I'd had in mind when
I went up there, simply to cool off. But it wasn't working. All
that had happened was that the sweat on my body had turned
clammy. I was breathing hard, and my hands weren't steady. I
felt on the edge of an anxiety attack, and I didn't know why.
On top of all that, my neck was hurting again.
And why hadn't I mentioned the purpose of our visit? I'd
told myself it was because she was too busy, but there had been
plenty of time while the three of us stood on the gate.
Instead, I'd let her prattle on about the good old days. It
would have been a perfect opportunity to brace her about taking
the job as the Earth-born member of our little team of
time-travelers. After holding forth about the generational gap
she would have looked silly turning us down. And I knew Callie.
She would love the job, would never admit loving it, and would
only accept it if she could be tricked into making it look as
if she had come up with the idea herself, as a favor to me and
Brenda.
I got up and moved to the windows. That didn't help, so I
walked to the opposite wall. No improvement. After I'd done
that three or four times I realized I was pacing. I rubbed the
back of my neck, drifted over to the windows again, and looked
out and down.
Callie's office windows overlook the barn interior from
just beneath the roof. There's a stairway leading to a verandah
"outside"-actually, within the small disneyland that is her
ranch. I was looking out over the breeding pens I had just
left. Callie was there, pointing something out to Brenda, who
stood beside her watching the spectacle of two mating
brontosaurs. Standing just behind them was someone who looked
familiar. I squinted, but it didn't help, so I grabbed the pair
of binoculars on a hook beside the window.
I focused in on the tall, red-headed figure of Andrew
MacDonald.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
I remembered leaving Callie's ranch. I recalled wandering
for a while, taking endless downscalators until there were no
more; I had reached the bottom level. That struck me as
entirely too metaphorical, so I took an infinite number of
upscalators and found my way to the Blind Pig. I don't recall
what I was thinking all those hours, but in retrospect, it
couldn't have been pretty.
You might say the next thing I recall is waking up, or
coming to, but that wouldn't be strictly accurate. It wouldn't
convey the nature of the experience. It felt more like I
reconstructed myself from far-flung bits--no, that implies some
effort on my part. The bits reconstructed themselves, and I
became self-aware in quantum stages. There was no dividing
line, but eventually I knew I was in a back room of the Pig.
This was considerable progress, and here my own will took over
and I looked around to learn more about my surroundings. I was
facing downward, so that's where I first turned my attention.
What I saw there was a woman's face.
"We'll never solve the problem of the head shot until an
entirely new technology comes along," she said. I had no idea
what this meant. Her hair was spread out on a pillow. There
were outspread hands on each side of her face. There was
something odd about her eyes, but I couldn't put my finger on
it. I suppose I was in a literal frame of mind, because having
thought that, I touched one of her eyeballs with the tip of my
finger. It didn't seem to bother her much. She blinked, and I
took my finger away.
There was an important discovery: when I touched her eye,
one of the hands had moved. Putting these data together, I
concluded that the hands bracketing her face were my hands. I
wiggled a finger, testing this hypothesis. One of the fingers
down there wiggled. Not the one I had intended, but how much
exactitude could I expect? I smiled, proud of myself.
"You can encase the brain in metal," she said. "Put a
blood bag on the anti-camera side of the head, fire a bullet
from the camera's pee-oh-vee. And ka-chow! The bullet goes
whanging off the metal cover, ka-blooey, the blood bag
explodes, and if you're lucky it looks like the bullet went
through the head and spread tomato sauce all over the wall in
back of the guy."
I felt large.
Had I taken large pills? I couldn't remember, but I must
have. Normally I don't, as they aren't really much of a thrill,
unless you get your kicks by imagining yourself to be the size
of an interplanetary liner. But you can mix them with other
drugs and get interesting effects. I must have done that.
"You can make it look even more real by putting teeny tiny
charges in back of the eyeballs. When the bullet hits, the
charges go off, and the eyeballs are blown out toward the
camera, see? Along with a nice blood haze, which is a plus in
masking whatever violations of realism are going on behind it."
Something was rubbing against my ears. I turned my head
about as quickly as they rotate the big scope out in
Copernicus, and saw a bare foot. At first I thought it was my
foot, but I knew from reports flown in by carrier pigeon that
my own feet were about three kilometers behind me, at the ends
of my legs, which were stretched out straight. I turned my head
the other way, saw another foot. Hers, I concluded. The first
was probably hers, too.
"But that damn steel case. Crimony! I can't tell you what
a--you should pardon the expression-headache that thing can be.
Especially when nine out of ten directors will insist the head
shot has to be in slomo. You give the chump a false forehead
full of maxfactor #3 to guarantee a juicy wound, you annodize
the braincase in black so--you hope--it'll look like a hole in
the head when the skin's ripped away, and what happens? The
damn bullet rips through everything, and there it is in the
dailies. A bright, shiny spot of metal right down there at the
bottom of the hole. The director chews you out, and it's
Re-take City."
Was I aboard a ship? That might account for the rocking
motion. But I remembered I was in the Blind Pig, and unless the
bar had been cut from its steel catacomb and embarked bodily,
it seemed unlikely we were at sea. I decided I still needed
more data. Feeling adventurous, I looked down between myself
and the woman's body.
For a moment the view made no sense at all. I could see my
own legs, and my feet, as if through a reversed telescope. Then
I couldn't see them any more. Then I could again. Where were
her legs? I couldn't see them. Oh, yes, since her feet were
tickling my ears, her legs must be those things against my
chest. So she was on the floor, on her back. And that explained
the other activity I saw. I stopped my up and down motion.
"I don't want to do this," I told her.
She kept talking about the difficulties of a head shot. I
realized that she was at least as detached from our coupling as
I was. I stood up and looked around the room. She never missed
a syllable. There were a pair of pants on the floor; they were
a million sizes too small for me, but they were probably mine.
I held them, lifted each leg with gargantuan deliberation, and
presto! The pants did fit. I stumbled through a curtain and
into the main room of the Pig.
It was maybe twenty steps to the bar. In that distance I
shrank alarmingly. It was not an unpleasant sensation, though
at one point I had to hold the back of a barstool to keep my
balance. Pleased with myself, I gingerly climbed onto a leather
stool.
"Bartender," I said, "I'll have another of the same."
The fellow behind the bar was known as Deep Throat, for a
famous clandestine news source. He probably had another name,
but no one knew it, and we all thought it was fitting it should
be that way. He nodded and was moving away, but someone sat on
the stool next to mine and reached over to grab his arm.
"Hold the heavy stuff this time, okay?" she said. I saw
that it was Cricket. She smiled at me, and I smiled back. I
shrugged, then nodded to Deep Throat's enquiring look. His
customers' state of sobriety is not his concern. If you can sit
at the bar--and pay--he'll serve you.
"How you doing, Hildy?" Cricket asked.
"Never better," I said, and watched my drink being
prepared. Cricket shut up for the time being. I knew there were
more questions to come. What are friends for?
The drink arrived, in one of the Pig's hologlasses. It's
probably the only bar in Luna that still uses them. They date
back to the midtwenty-first century, and they're rather
charming. A chip in the thick glass bottom projects a holo
picture just above the surface of the drink. I've seen them
with rolling dolphins, windsurfers, a tiny water polo team
complete with the sound of a cheering crowd, and Captain Ahab
harpooning the Great White Whale. But the most popular glass at
the Pig is the nuclear explosion at Bikini Atoll, in keeping
with the way Deep Throat mixes the drinks. I watched it for a
while. It starts with a very bright light, evolves into an
exquisitely detailed orange and black mushroom cloud that
expands until it is six inches high, then blows away. Then it
blows up again. The cycle takes about a minute.
I was watching the tiny battleships in the lagoon when I
realized I'd seen the show about a dozen times already, and
that my chin was resting on the bar. To enhance the view, I
suppose. I sat up straight, a little embarrassed. I glanced at
Cricket, but she was making a great show of producing little
moist rings with the bottom of her glass. I wiped my brow, and
swiveled on my stool to look at the rest of the room.
"The usual motley crew," Cricket said.
"The motliest," I agreed. "In fact, the word 'motley'
might have been coined simply to describe this scene."
"Maybe we should retire the word. Give it a place of honor
in the etymological hall of fame, like Olympic champions'
jerseys."
"Put it right next to motherhood, love, happiness . . .
words like that."
"On that note, I'll buy you another drink."
I hadn't finished the first, but who was counting?
There have always been unwritten rules in journalism, even
at the level on which I practice it. Often it is only the fear
of a libel suit that stays us from printing a particularly
scurrilous story. On Luna the laws are pretty strict on that
subject. If you defame someone, you'd better have sources
willing to testify before the CC. But more often you hold back
on printing something everyone knows for a subtler reason.
There is a symbiotic relationship between us and the people we
cover. Some would say parasitic, but they don't understand how
hungry for publicity a politician or celebrity can be. If we
stick to the rules concerning "off the record" statements,
things told us on "deep background," and so forth, everybody
benefits. I get sources who know I won't betray them, and the
subject of my stories gets the public exposure he craves.
Don't look for the Blind Pig Bar And Grill in your phone
memory. Don't expect to find it by wandering the halls of your
neighborhood mall. If you should somehow discover its location,
don't expect to be let in unless you know a regular who can
vouch for you. All I'll say about it is that it's within
walking distance of three major movie production studios, and
is reached through a door with a totally misleading sign on it.
The Blind Pig is the place where journalists and movie
people can mix without watching their mouths. Like its
political counterpart over by City Hall, the Huey P. Long
Memorial Gerrymandering Society, you can let your hair down
without fear of reading your words in the padloids the next
morning--at least, not for attribution. It's the place where
gossip, slander, rumor, and
=*= =*= =*= =*=
character assassination are given free rein, where the
biggest stars can mix with the lowliest stagehands and the
slimiest reporters and not have to watch their tongues. I once
saw a grip punch a ten-million-per-picture celebrity in the
nose, right there in the Pig. The two fought it out until they
were exhausted, went back to the set, and behaved as if nothing
had happened. That same punch, thrown in the studio, would have
landed the grip on the pavement in microseconds. But if the
star had exercised his clout for something that happened in the
Pig, and Deep Throat heard about it, the star would not have
been welcome again. There's not many places people like that
can go and socialize without being bothered. Deep Throat seldom
has to banish anyone.
A reporter once broke confidence with a producer, printed
a story told to him in the Pig. He never returned, and he's not
a reporter anymore. It's hard to cover the entertainment beat
without access to the Pig.
Places like the Pig have existed since Edison invented
Hollywood. The ambiance is dependent on what is shooting that
day. Just then there were three popular genres, two rising and
one on its way out, and all three were represented around the
room. There were warriors from Samurai Japan, taking a break
from The Shogun Attacks, currently lensing at
Sentry/Sensational Studios. A contingent of people in
old-fashioned spacesuits were employed at North Lunar
Filmwerks, where I'd heard Return Of The Alphans was behind
schedule and over budget and facing an uncertain reception, as
the box office for Asteroid Miner/Space Creature films had
turned soft in recent months. And a bunch in bandannas, cowboy
hats and dirty jeans had to be extras from The Gunslinger V.
Westerns were in the middle of their fourth period of filmic
popularity, two of them coming in my own lifetime. TG,V, as it
was known to the trade, had been doing location work not far
from my cabin in West Texas.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
In addition, there were the usual scattering of costumes
from other eras, and quite a number of surgically altered
gnomes, fairies, trolls, and so forth, working in low-budget
fantasy and children's shorts. There was a group of five
centaurs from a long-running sci-fi series that should have
been axed a dozen Roman numerals ago.
"Why don't you just move the brain?" I heard Cricket say.
"Put it somewhere else, like the stomach?"
"Oh, brother. Sure, why not? It's been done, of course,
but it's not worth the trouble. Nerve tissue is the hardest to
manipulate, and the brain? Forget it. There's twelve pairs of
cranial nerves you've got to extend through the neck and down
to the abdomen, for one thing. Then you have to re-train the
gagman--a couple of days, usually--so the time lag doesn't
show. And you don't think that matters? Audiences these days,
they've seen it all, they're sophisticated. They want realism.
We can make a fake brain easy enough and stuff it into the
gagman's skull in place of the one we re-located, but audiences
will spot the fact that the real brain's not where it's
supposed to be."
I turned on my stool and saw my new friend was sitting on
the other side of Cricket, still holding forth about her head
shots.
"Why not just use manikins?" Cricket asked, showing she
hadn't spent much time on the entertainment beat. "Wouldn't
they be cheaper than real actors?"
"Sure. A hell of a lot cheaper. Maybe you've never heard
of the Job Security Act, or unions."
"Oh."
"Damn right. Until a stunt performer dies, we can't
replace him with a machine. It's the law. And they die, all
right--even with your brain in a steel case, it's a risky
profession--but we don't lose more than two or three a year.
And there's thousands of them. Plus, they get better at
surviving the longer they work, so there's a law of diminishing
returns. I can't win." She swiveled, leaned her elbows on the
bar, looked out at the tables and sneered.
"Look at them. You can always spot gagmen. Look for the
ones with the vacant faces, like they're wondering where they
are. They pick up a piece of shrapnel in the head; we cut away
a little brain tissue and replace it with virgin cortex, and
they forget a little. Start getting a little vague about
things. Go home and can't remember the names of the kids. Back
to work the next day, giving me more headaches. Some of 'em
have very little left of their original brains, and they'd have
to look at their personnel file to tell you where they went to
school.
"And centaurs? I could build you a robot centaur in two
days, you couldn't tell it from the real thing. But don't tell
the Exotics Guild. No, I get to sign 'em to a five-year
contract, surgically convert 'em at great cost to the FX
budget, then put 'em through three months of kinesthetic rehab
until they can walk without falling on their faces. And what do
I get? A stumblebum who can't remember his lines or where the
camera is, who can't walk through a scene muttering, for
chrissake, without five rehearsals. And at the end of five
years, I get to pay to convert 'em back." She reached around
and got her drink, which was tall and had little tadpole-like
creatures swimming in it. She took a long pull on it, licked
her lips. "I tell you, it's a wonder we get any pictures made
at all."
"Nice to see a woman happy in her work," I said. She
looked over at me.
"Hildy," Cricket said, "have you met Princess Saxe-Coburg?
She's chief of special effects at NLM."
"We've met."
The Princess frowned at me, then recognition dawned. She
got off her stool and came toward me, a little unsteady. She
put her nose inches from mine.
"Sure. You pulled out on me a few minutes ago. Not a nice
thing to do to a lady."
At that range, I could see what was odd about her eyes.
She was wearing a pair of antique projection contacts, small
round flat-TV screens that floated over the cornea. I could
make out the ring of solar cells that powered them, and the
flyspeck chip that held the memory.
They'd been introduced just before the Invasion under a
variety of trade names, but the one that stuck was Bedroom
Eyes. After all, though they could reflect quite a variety of
moods, if you were close enough to see the little pictures the
mood you were looking for was probably sexual arousal. The more
modest models would show a turned-back bed, a romantic scene
from an old movie, or even, god help us, waves crashing on a
beach. Others made no pretensions, getting right to the
erection or spread thighs. Of course, they could reflect other
moods, as well, but people were seldom close enough to make
them out.
I'd never seen projection contacts worn by someone quite
as stoned as the Princess was. What they were projecting was an
interesting illusion: it was as if I were looking through two
holes into a hollow head. Remnants of an exploded brain were
collapsed at the bottom. Cracks in the skull let in light. And
swinging from stray synapses like vines in a jungle were a
menagerie of cartoon characters, from Mickey Mouse to Baba
Yaga.
The image disturbed me. I wondered why anyone would want
to do that to their brain. From wondering why she would want
to, I quickly got to why I would want to, and that was leading
me quickly to a place I didn't want to go. So I turned away
from her and saw Andrew MacDonald sitting at the other end of
the bar like a carrottopped Hibernian albatross.
"Did you know she's the Princess of Wales?" Cricket was
saying. "She's first in line to the throne of England."
"And Scotland, and Wales," said the Princess. "Hell, and
Ireland, and Canada and India. I might as well re-claim the
whole Empire while I'm at it. If my mother ever dies, it'll all
belong to me. Of course, there's the little matter of the
Invaders."
"Up the British," Cricket said, and they clinked their
glasses together.
"I met the King once," I said. I drained my drink and
slammed it down on the bar. Deep Throat caused it to vanish,
and began concocting another.
"Did you really?"
"He was a friend of my mother. In fact, he's a possible
candidate to be my father. Callie has never told me and never
will, but they were friendly together at about the right time.
So, if you apply modern laws of bastardy, I might have a claim
that supersedes yours." I glanced at MacDonald again.
Albatross? Hell, the man was more than a bird of evil omen,
more than a stormy petrel or a croaking raven. He was
Cassandra. He was a tropical depression, bad breath, a black
cat across my path. Everywhere I turned, there he was, a dog
humping my leg. He was a ladder in the stocking of my life. He
was snake eyes.
I hated him. I felt like punching him in the nose.
"Watch what you say," the Princess cautioned. "Remember
what happened to Mary, Queen of Scots."
I punched her in the nose.
She walked backward a few rubber-legged steps, then sat
down on the floor. In the ensuing silence, Cricket whispered in
my ear.
"I think she was kidding," she said.
For a few moments the whole place was quiet. Everyone was
watching us expectantly; they love a good brawl at the Blind
Pig. I looked at my clenched fist, and the Princess touched her
bloody nose with her hand, then looked at her palm. We both
looked up at the same time and our eyes met. And she came off
the floor and launched herself at me and started breaking all
the bones in my body that she could reach.
My hitting her had nothing to do with anything she had
said or done; at that moment in my life I would have hit anyone
standing next to me. But I'd have been a lot better off hitting
Cricket. In the Princess of Wales, I'd picked the wrong
opponent. She was taller than me and out-massed me. There was
probably a ten-centimeter difference in reach between us, and I
was on the short end of it. But most importantly, she had spent
the last forty years staging cinematic fights, and she knew
every trick in the book, and a lot that never got into the
book.
I'm tempted to say I got in two or three good punches.
Cricket says I did, but it might have been just to raise my
spirits. The truth is I can't remember much from the time her
horrid white teeth first filled my vision to the time I ripped
a meter-long gash in the carpet with my face.
To get to the carpet I'd first had to smash through a
table full of drinks. I used my face for that, too. Before the
table I had been flying, rather cleverly, I thought, and the
first real fun I'd had in many long minutes, but how I came to
be flying was a point I was never too clear on. It seems safe
to say that the Princess hurled me in some manner, holding on
to some part of my anatomy and then releasing it; Cricket said
it was my ankle, which would account for the room whirling
around so quickly just before I flew. Before that I had vague
memories of the bar mirror shattering, people scattering, blood
spattering. Then I crashed through the table.
I rolled over and spit out carpeting. Horses were milling
nervously all around me. Actually it was the centaur extras,
whose table I'd just ruined. I resolved to buy them all a round
of drinks. Before I could do that, though, there was the
Princess again, lifting me by the shoulder and drawing back a
bloody fist.
Then someone took hold of her arm from behind, and the
punch never landed. She stood up and turned to face her
challenger. I let my head rest against the ruins of a chair and
watched as she tried to punch Andrew MacDonald.
There was really no point in it. It took her a long time
to realize it, as her blood was up and she wasn't thinking
straight. So she kept throwing punches, and they kept just
missing, or hitting him harmlessly on the elbows or glancing
off his shoulders. She tried kicking, and the kicks were always
just a little off their target.
He never threw a punch. He didn't have to. After a time,
she was standing there breathing hard. He wasn't even sweating.
She straightened and held up her hands, palms outward.
I must have dozed off for a moment. Eventually I became
aware of the Princess, Cricket, and MacDonald, three indistinct
round faces hanging above me like a pawnbroker's sign.
"Can you move your legs?" MacDonald asked.
"Of course I can move my legs." What a silly question. I'd
been moving my legs for a hundred years.
"Then move them."
I did, and MacDonald frowned deeper.
"His back's probably broken," said Wales.
"Must have happened when he landed on the railing."
"Can you feel anything?"
"Unfortunately, yes." By that time most of the drugs were
wearing off, and everything from the waist up was hurting very
badly. Deep Throat arrived and lifted my head. He had a
painkiller in his hand, a little plastic cube with a wire which
he plugged into the socket at the base of my skull. He flicked
the switch, and I felt a lot better. I looked down and watched
as they removed the splintered chair leg which had pierced my
hip.
Since that wasn't a particularly diverting sight, I looked
around the room. Already cleaning robots were picking up broken
glassware and replacing shattered tables; Deep Throat is no
stranger to brawls, and he always keeps a supply of furniture.
In another few minutes there would be no sign that I had almost
destroyed the place five minutes ago. Well, I had almost
destroyed the place, in the sense that it was my hurtling body
that had done most of the damage.
I felt myself being lifted. MacDonald and Wales had made a
hammock with their arms. It was like riding in a sedan chair.
"Where are we going?"
"You're not in any immediate danger," MacDonald said.
"Your back is broken, and that should be fixed soon, so we're
taking you across the corridor to the NLF Studios. They have a
good repair shop there."
The Princess got us past the gate guard. We passed about a
dozen sound stage doors, and I was brought into the infirmary.
Which was jammed like Mainhardt's Department Store on
Christmas Eve. It seemed NLF was doing a big scene from some
war epic, and most of the available beds were taken by maimed
extras patiently waiting their turn, counting up the
triple-time salary they drew for injured downtime.
The room had been dressed as a field hospital for the
picture, apparently doing double duty when not actually
treating cinematic casualties. I pegged it as twentieth
century--a vintage season for wars--maybe World War Two, or the
Vietnam conflict, but it could easily have been the Boer War.
We were under a canvas roof and the place was cluttered with
hanging IV bottle props.
MacDonald returned from a conference with one of the
technicians and stood looking down at me.
"He says it'll be about half an hour. I could have you
taken to your own practitioner if you want to; it might be
quicker."
"Don't bother. I'm in no hurry. When they patch me up,
I'll probably just get up and do something foolish again."
He didn't say anything. There was something about his
demeanor that bothered me--as if I needed anything else about
him to bother me.
"Look," I said. "Don't ask me to explain why I did it. I
don't even know myself."
Still he said nothing.
"Either spit it out, or take your long face and park it
somewhere else."
He shrugged.
"I just have a problem with a man attacking a woman,
that's all."
"What?" I was sure I had misunderstood him. He wasn't
making any sense. But when he didn't repeat his astonishing
statement, I had to assume I'd heard him correctly.
"What does that have to do with anything?" I asked.
"Nothing, of course. But when I was young, it was
something you simply didn't do. I know it no longer makes
sense, but it still bothers me to see it."
"I'll be sure to tell the Mean Bitch you feel that way. If
they've put her back together after your last bout, that is."
He looked embarrassed.
"You know, that was a problem for me, early in my career.
I wouldn't fight female opponents. I was getting a bad
reputation and missing a lot of important match-ups because of
it. When some competitors started getting sex changes simply so
they could have a go at me, I realized how ridiculous I was
being. But to this day I have to psych myself something
terrible to get into the ring with someone who's currently
female."
"That's why you never hit . . . does the Princess have a
first name?"
"I don't know. But you're wrong. I wanted to stop her, but
I didn't want to hurt her. Frankly, you had it coming."
I looked away, feeling terrible. He was right.
"She's feeling bad about it, though. She said she just
couldn't seem to stop, once she got going."
"I'll send her the repair bill. That should cheer her up."
Cricket arrived from somewhere. She had a lighted
cigarette which she placed in my mouth, grinning.
"Got it from the prop department," she said. "They always
used to give these to wounded soldiers. I can't imagine why."
I puffed on it. It wasn't tobacco, thank god.
"Cheer up," Cricket said. "You tore up her fists pretty
good."
"I'm clever that way; I pounded them to hamburger with my
chin."
I suddenly felt an alarming urge to cry. Holding it back,
I asked both of them to leave me alone for a while. They did,
and I lay there smoking, studying the canvas ceiling. There
were no answers written there.
Why had the taste of life turned so bitter for me in the
last weeks?
#
I had sort of drifted away. When I came back, Brenda was
bending over me. Considering her height, she had a long way to
bend.
"How'd you find me?" I asked her.
"I'm a reporter, remember? It's my business to find things
out."
I thought of several cutting replies, but something about
the look on her face made me hold them back. Puppy love. I had
vague memories of how badly that could hurt, when it wasn't
returned.
And to give her her due, she was improving. Maybe she
would be a reporter, some day.
"You needn't have bothered. It's not like I'm badly hurt.
The head injuries were minimal."
"I'm not surprised. It would take a lot to hurt your
head."
"The brain wasn't injured at . . ." I stopped, realizing
she had just taken a jab at me. It had been pretty feeble, it
hardly qualified as a joke -- -- she might never master that
skill--but it was something. I grinned at her.
"I was going to stop by Texas and bring that doctor . . .
what was it you called him?"
"Sawbones. Pillroller. Quack. Caulker. Nepenthe. Leech.
Lazarmonger."
Her smile grew a little glassy; I could see her filing the
terms away for later research.
I was smiling, but the truth is, even with current medical
practices, being paralyzed from the waist down is a frightening
thing. We have an entirely different attitude toward our bodies
than most humans down the ages, we don't fear injury and we can
turn off pain and we generally treat flesh and bone as just
items to be fixed, but when things are badly wrong something in
the most primitive level of our brain stands up on its hind
legs and howls at the Earth. I was having a galloping anxiety
attack that the painkiller plugged into my medulla wasn't
dealing with at all. I have no idea if Brenda realized this,
but her presence at my bedside was strangely comforting. I was
glad she was there. I took her hand.
"Thanks for coming," I said. She squeezed my hand, then
looked away.
#
Eventually the planned casualties stopped streaming in,
and a team of medicos assembled around me. They plugged me in
to a dozen machines, studied the results, huddled, and
murmured, just as if what they thought really mattered, as if
the medical computer was not entirely in control of my
diagnosis and treatment.
They came to a decision, which was to turn me onto my
stomach. I surmised they had concluded it would be easier to
reach my broken spine that way. I'd better not ever hear
medicos called overpaid blood-monkeys again.
They began to carve. I couldn't feel it, but I could hear
some really disgusting sounds. You know those wet-muck
special-effect sounds they use in the movies when someone's
being disemboweled? They could have recorded them right over my
broken back. At one point something thumped to the floor. I
peered over the edge of the bed: it looked like a raw soup
bone. It was hard to believe it had once belonged to me.
They pow-wowed again, cut some more, brought in more
machines. They made sacrifices to the gods of Aesculapius,
Mithradates, Lethe, and Pfizer. They studied the entrails of a
goat. They tore off their clothes, joined hands, and danced in
a healing circle around my prone carcass.
Actually, I wished they had done any of those things. It
would have been a lot more interesting than what they did do,
which was mostly stand around and watch the automatic machines
mend me.
All there was to look at was an antique machine against
the wall, a few feet from my face. It had a glass screen and a
lot of knobs on it. Blue lines were crawling across the screen,
blipping into encouraging peaks now and then.
"Can I get you anything?" the machine asked. "Flowers?
Candy? Toys?"
"A new head might do the trick." It was the CC talking, of
course. It can throw its voice pretty much where it pleases,
since it was talking directly to the hearing center of my
brain. "How much will this cost me?"
"There's no final cost-estimate yet. But Wales has already
requested the bill be sent to her."
"Maybe what I meant was--"
"How badly are you hurt? How shall I put it. There are
three bones in the middle ear, called the Malleus, the Incus,
and the Stapes. You'll be happy to hear that not one of these
six bones was broken."
"So I'll still be able to play the piano."
"Just as badly as ever. In addition, several minor organs
emerged unscathed. Almost half a square meter of epidermis can
be salvaged."
"Tell me. If I'd come to this place . . . I mean, a
hospital like this one is pretending to be-- "
"I know what you mean."
"--with only primitive surgical techniques . . . would I
have survived?"
"It's unlikely. Your heart is intact, your brain is not
badly damaged, but the rest of your injuries are comparable to
stepping on a land mine. You'd never walk again, and you'd be
in great pain. You would come to wish you had not survived."
"How can you tell that?"
The CC said nothing, and I was left to ponder. That
usually doesn't do much good, where the CC is concerned.
We all deal with the CC a thousand times a day, but almost
all of that is with one of its subprograms, on a completely
impersonal level. But apart from the routine transactions of
living, it also generates a distinct personality for every
citizen of Luna, and is always there ready to offer advice,
counsel, or a shoulder to cry on. When I was young I spoke to
the CC extensively. He is every child's ideal imaginary
playmate. But as we grow older and make more real, less
tractable and entirely more willful and frustrating
relationships, contacts with the CC tend to fall off. With
adolescence and the discovery that, in spite of their
shortcomings, other people have a lot more to offer than the CC
ever will, we cut our ties even further until the CC is just a
very intelligent, unobtrusive servant, there to ease us through
the practical difficulties of life.
But the CC had now intruded, twice. I found myself
wondering, as I seldom had in the past, what was on its mind.
"I guess I've been pretty foolish," I ventured.
"Perhaps I should call Walter, tell him to tear up the
front page."
"All right. So it isn't news. So I've had things on my
mind."
"I was hoping you'd like to talk about that."
"Maybe we ought to talk about what you said before."
"Concerning your hypothetical suffering had you incurred
these injuries in, say, 1950?"
"Concerning your statement that I might prefer being
dead."
"It was merely an hypothesis. I observe how little anyone
today is equipped to tolerate pain, having never experienced an
appreciable amount of it. I note that even the people on Old
Earth, who were no strangers to it, often preferred death to
pain. I conclude that many people today would not hold life so
generational extremes, have to run this world together, which
means we have to make the effort to understand each other's
viewpoints. It's hard for me, and I know it must be hard for
you. It's as if I had to live with my
great-great-great-great-grandparents, who grew up during the
industrial revolution and were ruled by kings. We'd barely even
have a language in common."
"That's okay with me," Brenda said. "I do make the effort.
Why doesn't he?"
"Don't worry about him. He's always been like that."
"Sometimes he makes me so mad."
"It's just his way."
"Yoo-hoo, ladies. I'm here."
"Shut up, Mario. I can read him like a book, and I can
tell he likes you. It's just that, the more he likes you, the
worse he tends to treat you. It's his way of distancing himself
from affection, which he's not sure he's able to return."
I could see the wheels turning in Brenda's head and, since
she was not stupid, just ignorant, she eventually followed that
statement out to its logical--if you believed the premise in
the first place--conclusion, which was that I must love her
madly, because I treated her very badly. I looked
ostentatiously around at the walls of the barn.
"It must be hanging in your office," I said.
"What's that?"
"Your degree in psychology. I didn't even know you went
back to school."
"I've been in school every day of my life, jerk. And I
sure wouldn't need a degree to see through you. I spent thirty
years learning how to do that." There was more, something about
how just because I was a hundred years old now, I shouldn't
think I'd changed so much. But it was all in Italian, so I only
got the gist.
Callie gets a modest yearly stipend from the Antiquities
Preservation Board for staying fluent in Italian--something she
would have done anyway, since it was her native language and
she had firm ideas about the extinction of human knowledge. She
had tried to teach it to me but I had no aptitude beyond a few
kitchen words. And what was the point? The Central Computer
stored hundreds of languages no one spoke anymore, from
Cheyenne to Tasmanian, including all the languages that had
suffered a drastic drop in popularity because they never got
established on Luna before the Invasion. I spoke English and
German, like most everybody else, with a little Japanese thrown
in. There were sizable groups of Chinese speakers, and Swahili,
and Russian. Other than that, languages were preserved by study
groups of a few hundred fanatics like Callie.
I doubt Brenda even knew there was an Italian language, so
she listened to Callie's tirade with a certain wariness. Ah,
yes, Italian is a fine language for tirades.
"I guess you've known each other a long time," Brenda said
to me.
"We go way back."
She nodded, unhappy about something. Callie shouted, and I
turned to see her jump down into the breeding pen and stride
toward the crew of helpers, who were chivying the two brutes
into final mating position.
"Not yet, you idiots," she shouted. "Give them time." She
reached the group of people and started handing out orders
right and left. Callie had never been able to find good help. I
had been part of that help for a great many years, so I know
what I'm talking about. It took me a long time to realize that
no one would ever be good enough for her; she was one of those
people who never believed anyone could do a job as well as she
could do it herself. The maddening thing was, she was usually
right.
"Back off, they're not ready yet. Don't rush them. They'll
know when it's time. Our job is to facilitate, not initiate."If
I have any skills as a lover," I told Brenda, "it's because of
that."
"Because of her?"
"'Give them time. We're not on a schedule here. Show a
little finesse.' I heard that so many times I guess I took it
to heart."
And it did take me back, watching Callie working the stock
again. Of the major brontosaur ranchers in Luna, she was the
only one who didn't use artificial insemination at breeding
time. "If you think helping a pair copulate is tough," she
always said, "try getting a semen sample from a brontosaur
bull."
And there was a rough sort of poetry about dinosaur
mating, particularly brontosaurs.
Tyrannosaurs went about it as you might expect, full of
sound and fury. Two bulls would butt heads over a prospective
mate until one staggered away like a dusted-up nerg addict to
nurse an epic headache. I don't suppose the victor fared a lot
better except for the chance to grapple the tiny claw of his
lady fair.
Brontosaurs were more dainty. The male would spend three
or four days doing his dance, when he remembered to. These
creatures had short attention spans, even when in heat. He
would rear up on his hind legs and do a comical samba around
and around the female. She typically showed minimal interest
for the first two days. Then the seduction moved to the
love-bite stage, with the male nipping her around the base of
the tail while she placidly chewed her cud. When she finally
began rearing up with him, it was time to bring them into the
mating pen to pitch some serious woo.
That was going on now. The two of them were facing each
other on their hind legs, doing a little neck-weaving, a little
foreleg pawing. It could still be another hour before they were
ready, a condition signaled by the emergence of one of the
bull's two hemi-penes.
Nobody ever told me why a reptile needs two penises. Come
to think of it, I never asked. There are limits to curiosity.
"So how long were you involved with Callie?"
"What's that?" Brenda had drawn me out of my reverie, as
she had a habit of doing.
"She said thirty years. That's a long time. You must have
been real serious about her."
All right, so I'm dense. But I finally got it. I looked
out at the primal scene: two Mesozoic monsters, here through
the grace of modern genetic science, and a thin brown woman,
likewise.
"She's not my lover. She's my mother. Why don't you go
down there with her? She'll see you don't get hurt, and I'm
sure she'll be happy to tell you more than you ever wanted to
know about brontosaurs. I'm going to take a break."
I noticed as we climbed down the gate on opposite sides
that Brenda looked happier than I'd seen her all day.
#
I assume the mating went off without any trouble. It
usually does when Callie's in charge. I imagine the mating that
produced me was equally well-planned and carried out. Sex was
never a big deal to Callie. Having me was her nod in the
direction of duty. But I have no siblings, despite powerful
societal pressure toward large families at the time of my
birth. Once was apparently enough.
Paradoxically, I know I didn't spend any time in a Petri
dish, though it would have made the whole process much easier
for her if she'd availed herself of any of the medical advances
that could, today, make procreation, gestation, and parturition
about as personally involving as a wrong number on the
telephone. Callie had conceived me the old-fashioned way: a
random spermatozoan hitting the jackpot at the right time of
the month. She had carried me to full term, and had borne me in
pain, just like God promised Eve. And she had hated every
minute of it. How do I know that? She told me, and anyone else
who would listen. She told me an average of three times a day
throughout my childhood.
It wasn't so much the pain that had bothered her. For a
woman who could shoulder a reproductive organ almost as big as
she was and guide it into a cloaca of a filthiness that had to
be seen to be disbelieved, while standing kneedeep in dinosaur
droppings, Callie had an amazing streak of prissiness. She had
hated the bloodiness of childbirth, the smells and sensations
of it.
#
Callie's office was cool. That's what I'd had in mind when
I went up there, simply to cool off. But it wasn't working. All
that had happened was that the sweat on my body had turned
clammy. I was breathing hard, and my hands weren't steady. I
felt on the edge of an anxiety attack, and I didn't know why.
On top of all that, my neck was hurting again.
And why hadn't I mentioned the purpose of our visit? I'd
told myself it was because she was too busy, but there had been
plenty of time while the three of us stood on the gate.
Instead, I'd let her prattle on about the good old days. It
would have been a perfect opportunity to brace her about taking
the job as the Earth-born member of our little team of
time-travelers. After holding forth about the generational gap
she would have looked silly turning us down. And I knew Callie.
She would love the job, would never admit loving it, and would
only accept it if she could be tricked into making it look as
if she had come up with the idea herself, as a favor to me and
Brenda.
I got up and moved to the windows. That didn't help, so I
walked to the opposite wall. No improvement. After I'd done
that three or four times I realized I was pacing. I rubbed the
back of my neck, drifted over to the windows again, and looked
out and down.
Callie's office windows overlook the barn interior from
just beneath the roof. There's a stairway leading to a verandah
"outside"-actually, within the small disneyland that is her
ranch. I was looking out over the breeding pens I had just
left. Callie was there, pointing something out to Brenda, who
stood beside her watching the spectacle of two mating
brontosaurs. Standing just behind them was someone who looked
familiar. I squinted, but it didn't help, so I grabbed the pair
of binoculars on a hook beside the window.
I focused in on the tall, red-headed figure of Andrew
MacDonald.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
I remembered leaving Callie's ranch. I recalled wandering
for a while, taking endless downscalators until there were no
more; I had reached the bottom level. That struck me as
entirely too metaphorical, so I took an infinite number of
upscalators and found my way to the Blind Pig. I don't recall
what I was thinking all those hours, but in retrospect, it
couldn't have been pretty.
You might say the next thing I recall is waking up, or
coming to, but that wouldn't be strictly accurate. It wouldn't
convey the nature of the experience. It felt more like I
reconstructed myself from far-flung bits--no, that implies some
effort on my part. The bits reconstructed themselves, and I
became self-aware in quantum stages. There was no dividing
line, but eventually I knew I was in a back room of the Pig.
This was considerable progress, and here my own will took over
and I looked around to learn more about my surroundings. I was
facing downward, so that's where I first turned my attention.
What I saw there was a woman's face.
"We'll never solve the problem of the head shot until an
entirely new technology comes along," she said. I had no idea
what this meant. Her hair was spread out on a pillow. There
were outspread hands on each side of her face. There was
something odd about her eyes, but I couldn't put my finger on
it. I suppose I was in a literal frame of mind, because having
thought that, I touched one of her eyeballs with the tip of my
finger. It didn't seem to bother her much. She blinked, and I
took my finger away.
There was an important discovery: when I touched her eye,
one of the hands had moved. Putting these data together, I
concluded that the hands bracketing her face were my hands. I
wiggled a finger, testing this hypothesis. One of the fingers
down there wiggled. Not the one I had intended, but how much
exactitude could I expect? I smiled, proud of myself.
"You can encase the brain in metal," she said. "Put a
blood bag on the anti-camera side of the head, fire a bullet
from the camera's pee-oh-vee. And ka-chow! The bullet goes
whanging off the metal cover, ka-blooey, the blood bag
explodes, and if you're lucky it looks like the bullet went
through the head and spread tomato sauce all over the wall in
back of the guy."
I felt large.
Had I taken large pills? I couldn't remember, but I must
have. Normally I don't, as they aren't really much of a thrill,
unless you get your kicks by imagining yourself to be the size
of an interplanetary liner. But you can mix them with other
drugs and get interesting effects. I must have done that.
"You can make it look even more real by putting teeny tiny
charges in back of the eyeballs. When the bullet hits, the
charges go off, and the eyeballs are blown out toward the
camera, see? Along with a nice blood haze, which is a plus in
masking whatever violations of realism are going on behind it."
Something was rubbing against my ears. I turned my head
about as quickly as they rotate the big scope out in
Copernicus, and saw a bare foot. At first I thought it was my
foot, but I knew from reports flown in by carrier pigeon that
my own feet were about three kilometers behind me, at the ends
of my legs, which were stretched out straight. I turned my head
the other way, saw another foot. Hers, I concluded. The first
was probably hers, too.
"But that damn steel case. Crimony! I can't tell you what
a--you should pardon the expression-headache that thing can be.
Especially when nine out of ten directors will insist the head
shot has to be in slomo. You give the chump a false forehead
full of maxfactor #3 to guarantee a juicy wound, you annodize
the braincase in black so--you hope--it'll look like a hole in
the head when the skin's ripped away, and what happens? The
damn bullet rips through everything, and there it is in the
dailies. A bright, shiny spot of metal right down there at the
bottom of the hole. The director chews you out, and it's
Re-take City."
Was I aboard a ship? That might account for the rocking
motion. But I remembered I was in the Blind Pig, and unless the
bar had been cut from its steel catacomb and embarked bodily,
it seemed unlikely we were at sea. I decided I still needed
more data. Feeling adventurous, I looked down between myself
and the woman's body.
For a moment the view made no sense at all. I could see my
own legs, and my feet, as if through a reversed telescope. Then
I couldn't see them any more. Then I could again. Where were
her legs? I couldn't see them. Oh, yes, since her feet were
tickling my ears, her legs must be those things against my
chest. So she was on the floor, on her back. And that explained
the other activity I saw. I stopped my up and down motion.
"I don't want to do this," I told her.
She kept talking about the difficulties of a head shot. I
realized that she was at least as detached from our coupling as
I was. I stood up and looked around the room. She never missed
a syllable. There were a pair of pants on the floor; they were
a million sizes too small for me, but they were probably mine.
I held them, lifted each leg with gargantuan deliberation, and
presto! The pants did fit. I stumbled through a curtain and
into the main room of the Pig.
It was maybe twenty steps to the bar. In that distance I
shrank alarmingly. It was not an unpleasant sensation, though
at one point I had to hold the back of a barstool to keep my
balance. Pleased with myself, I gingerly climbed onto a leather
stool.
"Bartender," I said, "I'll have another of the same."
The fellow behind the bar was known as Deep Throat, for a
famous clandestine news source. He probably had another name,
but no one knew it, and we all thought it was fitting it should
be that way. He nodded and was moving away, but someone sat on
the stool next to mine and reached over to grab his arm.
"Hold the heavy stuff this time, okay?" she said. I saw
that it was Cricket. She smiled at me, and I smiled back. I
shrugged, then nodded to Deep Throat's enquiring look. His
customers' state of sobriety is not his concern. If you can sit
at the bar--and pay--he'll serve you.
"How you doing, Hildy?" Cricket asked.
"Never better," I said, and watched my drink being
prepared. Cricket shut up for the time being. I knew there were
more questions to come. What are friends for?
The drink arrived, in one of the Pig's hologlasses. It's
probably the only bar in Luna that still uses them. They date
back to the midtwenty-first century, and they're rather
charming. A chip in the thick glass bottom projects a holo
picture just above the surface of the drink. I've seen them
with rolling dolphins, windsurfers, a tiny water polo team
complete with the sound of a cheering crowd, and Captain Ahab
harpooning the Great White Whale. But the most popular glass at
the Pig is the nuclear explosion at Bikini Atoll, in keeping
with the way Deep Throat mixes the drinks. I watched it for a
while. It starts with a very bright light, evolves into an
exquisitely detailed orange and black mushroom cloud that
expands until it is six inches high, then blows away. Then it
blows up again. The cycle takes about a minute.
I was watching the tiny battleships in the lagoon when I
realized I'd seen the show about a dozen times already, and
that my chin was resting on the bar. To enhance the view, I
suppose. I sat up straight, a little embarrassed. I glanced at
Cricket, but she was making a great show of producing little
moist rings with the bottom of her glass. I wiped my brow, and
swiveled on my stool to look at the rest of the room.
"The usual motley crew," Cricket said.
"The motliest," I agreed. "In fact, the word 'motley'
might have been coined simply to describe this scene."
"Maybe we should retire the word. Give it a place of honor
in the etymological hall of fame, like Olympic champions'
jerseys."
"Put it right next to motherhood, love, happiness . . .
words like that."
"On that note, I'll buy you another drink."
I hadn't finished the first, but who was counting?
There have always been unwritten rules in journalism, even
at the level on which I practice it. Often it is only the fear
of a libel suit that stays us from printing a particularly
scurrilous story. On Luna the laws are pretty strict on that
subject. If you defame someone, you'd better have sources
willing to testify before the CC. But more often you hold back
on printing something everyone knows for a subtler reason.
There is a symbiotic relationship between us and the people we
cover. Some would say parasitic, but they don't understand how
hungry for publicity a politician or celebrity can be. If we
stick to the rules concerning "off the record" statements,
things told us on "deep background," and so forth, everybody
benefits. I get sources who know I won't betray them, and the
subject of my stories gets the public exposure he craves.
Don't look for the Blind Pig Bar And Grill in your phone
memory. Don't expect to find it by wandering the halls of your
neighborhood mall. If you should somehow discover its location,
don't expect to be let in unless you know a regular who can
vouch for you. All I'll say about it is that it's within
walking distance of three major movie production studios, and
is reached through a door with a totally misleading sign on it.
The Blind Pig is the place where journalists and movie
people can mix without watching their mouths. Like its
political counterpart over by City Hall, the Huey P. Long
Memorial Gerrymandering Society, you can let your hair down
without fear of reading your words in the padloids the next
morning--at least, not for attribution. It's the place where
gossip, slander, rumor, and
=*= =*= =*= =*=
character assassination are given free rein, where the
biggest stars can mix with the lowliest stagehands and the
slimiest reporters and not have to watch their tongues. I once
saw a grip punch a ten-million-per-picture celebrity in the
nose, right there in the Pig. The two fought it out until they
were exhausted, went back to the set, and behaved as if nothing
had happened. That same punch, thrown in the studio, would have
landed the grip on the pavement in microseconds. But if the
star had exercised his clout for something that happened in the
Pig, and Deep Throat heard about it, the star would not have
been welcome again. There's not many places people like that
can go and socialize without being bothered. Deep Throat seldom
has to banish anyone.
A reporter once broke confidence with a producer, printed
a story told to him in the Pig. He never returned, and he's not
a reporter anymore. It's hard to cover the entertainment beat
without access to the Pig.
Places like the Pig have existed since Edison invented
Hollywood. The ambiance is dependent on what is shooting that
day. Just then there were three popular genres, two rising and
one on its way out, and all three were represented around the
room. There were warriors from Samurai Japan, taking a break
from The Shogun Attacks, currently lensing at
Sentry/Sensational Studios. A contingent of people in
old-fashioned spacesuits were employed at North Lunar
Filmwerks, where I'd heard Return Of The Alphans was behind
schedule and over budget and facing an uncertain reception, as
the box office for Asteroid Miner/Space Creature films had
turned soft in recent months. And a bunch in bandannas, cowboy
hats and dirty jeans had to be extras from The Gunslinger V.
Westerns were in the middle of their fourth period of filmic
popularity, two of them coming in my own lifetime. TG,V, as it
was known to the trade, had been doing location work not far
from my cabin in West Texas.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
In addition, there were the usual scattering of costumes
from other eras, and quite a number of surgically altered
gnomes, fairies, trolls, and so forth, working in low-budget
fantasy and children's shorts. There was a group of five
centaurs from a long-running sci-fi series that should have
been axed a dozen Roman numerals ago.
"Why don't you just move the brain?" I heard Cricket say.
"Put it somewhere else, like the stomach?"
"Oh, brother. Sure, why not? It's been done, of course,
but it's not worth the trouble. Nerve tissue is the hardest to
manipulate, and the brain? Forget it. There's twelve pairs of
cranial nerves you've got to extend through the neck and down
to the abdomen, for one thing. Then you have to re-train the
gagman--a couple of days, usually--so the time lag doesn't
show. And you don't think that matters? Audiences these days,
they've seen it all, they're sophisticated. They want realism.
We can make a fake brain easy enough and stuff it into the
gagman's skull in place of the one we re-located, but audiences
will spot the fact that the real brain's not where it's
supposed to be."
I turned on my stool and saw my new friend was sitting on
the other side of Cricket, still holding forth about her head
shots.
"Why not just use manikins?" Cricket asked, showing she
hadn't spent much time on the entertainment beat. "Wouldn't
they be cheaper than real actors?"
"Sure. A hell of a lot cheaper. Maybe you've never heard
of the Job Security Act, or unions."
"Oh."
"Damn right. Until a stunt performer dies, we can't
replace him with a machine. It's the law. And they die, all
right--even with your brain in a steel case, it's a risky
profession--but we don't lose more than two or three a year.
And there's thousands of them. Plus, they get better at
surviving the longer they work, so there's a law of diminishing
returns. I can't win." She swiveled, leaned her elbows on the
bar, looked out at the tables and sneered.
"Look at them. You can always spot gagmen. Look for the
ones with the vacant faces, like they're wondering where they
are. They pick up a piece of shrapnel in the head; we cut away
a little brain tissue and replace it with virgin cortex, and
they forget a little. Start getting a little vague about
things. Go home and can't remember the names of the kids. Back
to work the next day, giving me more headaches. Some of 'em
have very little left of their original brains, and they'd have
to look at their personnel file to tell you where they went to
school.
"And centaurs? I could build you a robot centaur in two
days, you couldn't tell it from the real thing. But don't tell
the Exotics Guild. No, I get to sign 'em to a five-year
contract, surgically convert 'em at great cost to the FX
budget, then put 'em through three months of kinesthetic rehab
until they can walk without falling on their faces. And what do
I get? A stumblebum who can't remember his lines or where the
camera is, who can't walk through a scene muttering, for
chrissake, without five rehearsals. And at the end of five
years, I get to pay to convert 'em back." She reached around
and got her drink, which was tall and had little tadpole-like
creatures swimming in it. She took a long pull on it, licked
her lips. "I tell you, it's a wonder we get any pictures made
at all."
"Nice to see a woman happy in her work," I said. She
looked over at me.
"Hildy," Cricket said, "have you met Princess Saxe-Coburg?
She's chief of special effects at NLM."
"We've met."
The Princess frowned at me, then recognition dawned. She
got off her stool and came toward me, a little unsteady. She
put her nose inches from mine.
"Sure. You pulled out on me a few minutes ago. Not a nice
thing to do to a lady."
At that range, I could see what was odd about her eyes.
She was wearing a pair of antique projection contacts, small
round flat-TV screens that floated over the cornea. I could
make out the ring of solar cells that powered them, and the
flyspeck chip that held the memory.
They'd been introduced just before the Invasion under a
variety of trade names, but the one that stuck was Bedroom
Eyes. After all, though they could reflect quite a variety of
moods, if you were close enough to see the little pictures the
mood you were looking for was probably sexual arousal. The more
modest models would show a turned-back bed, a romantic scene
from an old movie, or even, god help us, waves crashing on a
beach. Others made no pretensions, getting right to the
erection or spread thighs. Of course, they could reflect other
moods, as well, but people were seldom close enough to make
them out.
I'd never seen projection contacts worn by someone quite
as stoned as the Princess was. What they were projecting was an
interesting illusion: it was as if I were looking through two
holes into a hollow head. Remnants of an exploded brain were
collapsed at the bottom. Cracks in the skull let in light. And
swinging from stray synapses like vines in a jungle were a
menagerie of cartoon characters, from Mickey Mouse to Baba
Yaga.
The image disturbed me. I wondered why anyone would want
to do that to their brain. From wondering why she would want
to, I quickly got to why I would want to, and that was leading
me quickly to a place I didn't want to go. So I turned away
from her and saw Andrew MacDonald sitting at the other end of
the bar like a carrottopped Hibernian albatross.
"Did you know she's the Princess of Wales?" Cricket was
saying. "She's first in line to the throne of England."
"And Scotland, and Wales," said the Princess. "Hell, and
Ireland, and Canada and India. I might as well re-claim the
whole Empire while I'm at it. If my mother ever dies, it'll all
belong to me. Of course, there's the little matter of the
Invaders."
"Up the British," Cricket said, and they clinked their
glasses together.
"I met the King once," I said. I drained my drink and
slammed it down on the bar. Deep Throat caused it to vanish,
and began concocting another.
"Did you really?"
"He was a friend of my mother. In fact, he's a possible
candidate to be my father. Callie has never told me and never
will, but they were friendly together at about the right time.
So, if you apply modern laws of bastardy, I might have a claim
that supersedes yours." I glanced at MacDonald again.
Albatross? Hell, the man was more than a bird of evil omen,
more than a stormy petrel or a croaking raven. He was
Cassandra. He was a tropical depression, bad breath, a black
cat across my path. Everywhere I turned, there he was, a dog
humping my leg. He was a ladder in the stocking of my life. He
was snake eyes.
I hated him. I felt like punching him in the nose.
"Watch what you say," the Princess cautioned. "Remember
what happened to Mary, Queen of Scots."
I punched her in the nose.
She walked backward a few rubber-legged steps, then sat
down on the floor. In the ensuing silence, Cricket whispered in
my ear.
"I think she was kidding," she said.
For a few moments the whole place was quiet. Everyone was
watching us expectantly; they love a good brawl at the Blind
Pig. I looked at my clenched fist, and the Princess touched her
bloody nose with her hand, then looked at her palm. We both
looked up at the same time and our eyes met. And she came off
the floor and launched herself at me and started breaking all
the bones in my body that she could reach.
My hitting her had nothing to do with anything she had
said or done; at that moment in my life I would have hit anyone
standing next to me. But I'd have been a lot better off hitting
Cricket. In the Princess of Wales, I'd picked the wrong
opponent. She was taller than me and out-massed me. There was
probably a ten-centimeter difference in reach between us, and I
was on the short end of it. But most importantly, she had spent
the last forty years staging cinematic fights, and she knew
every trick in the book, and a lot that never got into the
book.
I'm tempted to say I got in two or three good punches.
Cricket says I did, but it might have been just to raise my
spirits. The truth is I can't remember much from the time her
horrid white teeth first filled my vision to the time I ripped
a meter-long gash in the carpet with my face.
To get to the carpet I'd first had to smash through a
table full of drinks. I used my face for that, too. Before the
table I had been flying, rather cleverly, I thought, and the
first real fun I'd had in many long minutes, but how I came to
be flying was a point I was never too clear on. It seems safe
to say that the Princess hurled me in some manner, holding on
to some part of my anatomy and then releasing it; Cricket said
it was my ankle, which would account for the room whirling
around so quickly just before I flew. Before that I had vague
memories of the bar mirror shattering, people scattering, blood
spattering. Then I crashed through the table.
I rolled over and spit out carpeting. Horses were milling
nervously all around me. Actually it was the centaur extras,
whose table I'd just ruined. I resolved to buy them all a round
of drinks. Before I could do that, though, there was the
Princess again, lifting me by the shoulder and drawing back a
bloody fist.
Then someone took hold of her arm from behind, and the
punch never landed. She stood up and turned to face her
challenger. I let my head rest against the ruins of a chair and
watched as she tried to punch Andrew MacDonald.
There was really no point in it. It took her a long time
to realize it, as her blood was up and she wasn't thinking
straight. So she kept throwing punches, and they kept just
missing, or hitting him harmlessly on the elbows or glancing
off his shoulders. She tried kicking, and the kicks were always
just a little off their target.
He never threw a punch. He didn't have to. After a time,
she was standing there breathing hard. He wasn't even sweating.
She straightened and held up her hands, palms outward.
I must have dozed off for a moment. Eventually I became
aware of the Princess, Cricket, and MacDonald, three indistinct
round faces hanging above me like a pawnbroker's sign.
"Can you move your legs?" MacDonald asked.
"Of course I can move my legs." What a silly question. I'd
been moving my legs for a hundred years.
"Then move them."
I did, and MacDonald frowned deeper.
"His back's probably broken," said Wales.
"Must have happened when he landed on the railing."
"Can you feel anything?"
"Unfortunately, yes." By that time most of the drugs were
wearing off, and everything from the waist up was hurting very
badly. Deep Throat arrived and lifted my head. He had a
painkiller in his hand, a little plastic cube with a wire which
he plugged into the socket at the base of my skull. He flicked
the switch, and I felt a lot better. I looked down and watched
as they removed the splintered chair leg which had pierced my
hip.
Since that wasn't a particularly diverting sight, I looked
around the room. Already cleaning robots were picking up broken
glassware and replacing shattered tables; Deep Throat is no
stranger to brawls, and he always keeps a supply of furniture.
In another few minutes there would be no sign that I had almost
destroyed the place five minutes ago. Well, I had almost
destroyed the place, in the sense that it was my hurtling body
that had done most of the damage.
I felt myself being lifted. MacDonald and Wales had made a
hammock with their arms. It was like riding in a sedan chair.
"Where are we going?"
"You're not in any immediate danger," MacDonald said.
"Your back is broken, and that should be fixed soon, so we're
taking you across the corridor to the NLF Studios. They have a
good repair shop there."
The Princess got us past the gate guard. We passed about a
dozen sound stage doors, and I was brought into the infirmary.
Which was jammed like Mainhardt's Department Store on
Christmas Eve. It seemed NLF was doing a big scene from some
war epic, and most of the available beds were taken by maimed
extras patiently waiting their turn, counting up the
triple-time salary they drew for injured downtime.
The room had been dressed as a field hospital for the
picture, apparently doing double duty when not actually
treating cinematic casualties. I pegged it as twentieth
century--a vintage season for wars--maybe World War Two, or the
Vietnam conflict, but it could easily have been the Boer War.
We were under a canvas roof and the place was cluttered with
hanging IV bottle props.
MacDonald returned from a conference with one of the
technicians and stood looking down at me.
"He says it'll be about half an hour. I could have you
taken to your own practitioner if you want to; it might be
quicker."
"Don't bother. I'm in no hurry. When they patch me up,
I'll probably just get up and do something foolish again."
He didn't say anything. There was something about his
demeanor that bothered me--as if I needed anything else about
him to bother me.
"Look," I said. "Don't ask me to explain why I did it. I
don't even know myself."
Still he said nothing.
"Either spit it out, or take your long face and park it
somewhere else."
He shrugged.
"I just have a problem with a man attacking a woman,
that's all."
"What?" I was sure I had misunderstood him. He wasn't
making any sense. But when he didn't repeat his astonishing
statement, I had to assume I'd heard him correctly.
"What does that have to do with anything?" I asked.
"Nothing, of course. But when I was young, it was
something you simply didn't do. I know it no longer makes
sense, but it still bothers me to see it."
"I'll be sure to tell the Mean Bitch you feel that way. If
they've put her back together after your last bout, that is."
He looked embarrassed.
"You know, that was a problem for me, early in my career.
I wouldn't fight female opponents. I was getting a bad
reputation and missing a lot of important match-ups because of
it. When some competitors started getting sex changes simply so
they could have a go at me, I realized how ridiculous I was
being. But to this day I have to psych myself something
terrible to get into the ring with someone who's currently
female."
"That's why you never hit . . . does the Princess have a
first name?"
"I don't know. But you're wrong. I wanted to stop her, but
I didn't want to hurt her. Frankly, you had it coming."
I looked away, feeling terrible. He was right.
"She's feeling bad about it, though. She said she just
couldn't seem to stop, once she got going."
"I'll send her the repair bill. That should cheer her up."
Cricket arrived from somewhere. She had a lighted
cigarette which she placed in my mouth, grinning.
"Got it from the prop department," she said. "They always
used to give these to wounded soldiers. I can't imagine why."
I puffed on it. It wasn't tobacco, thank god.
"Cheer up," Cricket said. "You tore up her fists pretty
good."
"I'm clever that way; I pounded them to hamburger with my
chin."
I suddenly felt an alarming urge to cry. Holding it back,
I asked both of them to leave me alone for a while. They did,
and I lay there smoking, studying the canvas ceiling. There
were no answers written there.
Why had the taste of life turned so bitter for me in the
last weeks?
#
I had sort of drifted away. When I came back, Brenda was
bending over me. Considering her height, she had a long way to
bend.
"How'd you find me?" I asked her.
"I'm a reporter, remember? It's my business to find things
out."
I thought of several cutting replies, but something about
the look on her face made me hold them back. Puppy love. I had
vague memories of how badly that could hurt, when it wasn't
returned.
And to give her her due, she was improving. Maybe she
would be a reporter, some day.
"You needn't have bothered. It's not like I'm badly hurt.
The head injuries were minimal."
"I'm not surprised. It would take a lot to hurt your
head."
"The brain wasn't injured at . . ." I stopped, realizing
she had just taken a jab at me. It had been pretty feeble, it
hardly qualified as a joke -- -- she might never master that
skill--but it was something. I grinned at her.
"I was going to stop by Texas and bring that doctor . . .
what was it you called him?"
"Sawbones. Pillroller. Quack. Caulker. Nepenthe. Leech.
Lazarmonger."
Her smile grew a little glassy; I could see her filing the
terms away for later research.
I was smiling, but the truth is, even with current medical
practices, being paralyzed from the waist down is a frightening
thing. We have an entirely different attitude toward our bodies
than most humans down the ages, we don't fear injury and we can
turn off pain and we generally treat flesh and bone as just
items to be fixed, but when things are badly wrong something in
the most primitive level of our brain stands up on its hind
legs and howls at the Earth. I was having a galloping anxiety
attack that the painkiller plugged into my medulla wasn't
dealing with at all. I have no idea if Brenda realized this,
but her presence at my bedside was strangely comforting. I was
glad she was there. I took her hand.
"Thanks for coming," I said. She squeezed my hand, then
looked away.
#
Eventually the planned casualties stopped streaming in,
and a team of medicos assembled around me. They plugged me in
to a dozen machines, studied the results, huddled, and
murmured, just as if what they thought really mattered, as if
the medical computer was not entirely in control of my
diagnosis and treatment.
They came to a decision, which was to turn me onto my
stomach. I surmised they had concluded it would be easier to
reach my broken spine that way. I'd better not ever hear
medicos called overpaid blood-monkeys again.
They began to carve. I couldn't feel it, but I could hear
some really disgusting sounds. You know those wet-muck
special-effect sounds they use in the movies when someone's
being disemboweled? They could have recorded them right over my
broken back. At one point something thumped to the floor. I
peered over the edge of the bed: it looked like a raw soup
bone. It was hard to believe it had once belonged to me.
They pow-wowed again, cut some more, brought in more
machines. They made sacrifices to the gods of Aesculapius,
Mithradates, Lethe, and Pfizer. They studied the entrails of a
goat. They tore off their clothes, joined hands, and danced in
a healing circle around my prone carcass.
Actually, I wished they had done any of those things. It
would have been a lot more interesting than what they did do,
which was mostly stand around and watch the automatic machines
mend me.
All there was to look at was an antique machine against
the wall, a few feet from my face. It had a glass screen and a
lot of knobs on it. Blue lines were crawling across the screen,
blipping into encouraging peaks now and then.
"Can I get you anything?" the machine asked. "Flowers?
Candy? Toys?"
"A new head might do the trick." It was the CC talking, of
course. It can throw its voice pretty much where it pleases,
since it was talking directly to the hearing center of my
brain. "How much will this cost me?"
"There's no final cost-estimate yet. But Wales has already
requested the bill be sent to her."
"Maybe what I meant was--"
"How badly are you hurt? How shall I put it. There are
three bones in the middle ear, called the Malleus, the Incus,
and the Stapes. You'll be happy to hear that not one of these
six bones was broken."
"So I'll still be able to play the piano."
"Just as badly as ever. In addition, several minor organs
emerged unscathed. Almost half a square meter of epidermis can
be salvaged."
"Tell me. If I'd come to this place . . . I mean, a
hospital like this one is pretending to be-- "
"I know what you mean."
"--with only primitive surgical techniques . . . would I
have survived?"
"It's unlikely. Your heart is intact, your brain is not
badly damaged, but the rest of your injuries are comparable to
stepping on a land mine. You'd never walk again, and you'd be
in great pain. You would come to wish you had not survived."
"How can you tell that?"
The CC said nothing, and I was left to ponder. That
usually doesn't do much good, where the CC is concerned.
We all deal with the CC a thousand times a day, but almost
all of that is with one of its subprograms, on a completely
impersonal level. But apart from the routine transactions of
living, it also generates a distinct personality for every
citizen of Luna, and is always there ready to offer advice,
counsel, or a shoulder to cry on. When I was young I spoke to
the CC extensively. He is every child's ideal imaginary
playmate. But as we grow older and make more real, less
tractable and entirely more willful and frustrating
relationships, contacts with the CC tend to fall off. With
adolescence and the discovery that, in spite of their
shortcomings, other people have a lot more to offer than the CC
ever will, we cut our ties even further until the CC is just a
very intelligent, unobtrusive servant, there to ease us through
the practical difficulties of life.
But the CC had now intruded, twice. I found myself
wondering, as I seldom had in the past, what was on its mind.
"I guess I've been pretty foolish," I ventured.
"Perhaps I should call Walter, tell him to tear up the
front page."
"All right. So it isn't news. So I've had things on my
mind."
"I was hoping you'd like to talk about that."
"Maybe we ought to talk about what you said before."
"Concerning your hypothetical suffering had you incurred
these injuries in, say, 1950?"
"Concerning your statement that I might prefer being
dead."
"It was merely an hypothesis. I observe how little anyone
today is equipped to tolerate pain, having never experienced an
appreciable amount of it. I note that even the people on Old
Earth, who were no strangers to it, often preferred death to
pain. I conclude that many people today would not hold life so