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And Hildy, we all need something to do in this world. Life can
seem pointless without gratifying work."
That shut me up for a while. I knew only too well how
pointless life could seem.
"And he really does love animals," the CC added. "He hurts
when he thinks of one dying. I shouldn't be telling you any of
this, as I'm prohibited from commenting on the qualities, good
or bad, of human citizens. But in view of our recent
relationship, I thought . . ." He let it trail off, unfinished.
Enough of that.
"What about death?" I asked him. "You mentioned hunger and
the image of a predator. I'd think you'd get a stronger
reaction if you planted the idea of their actual deaths in
their minds."
"Much more of a reaction than you'd want. Predators and
hunger imply death, but inspire less fear than the actual
event. These negotiations are quite touchy; I've tried many
times to talk Callie into holding them indoors. But she says
that if 'salad-head' isn't afraid to pow-wow in the middle of
the herd, she isn't either. No, the death-image is the nuclear
weapon of predator/prey relations. It's usually a prelude to
either an attempt at union-busting, or a boycott."
"Or something even more serious."
"So I infer. Of course, I have no proof."
I wondered about that. Maybe the CC was leveling with me
when he said he only spied into private spaces in circumstances
as unusual as my own. Or into minds, for that matter. I
certainly no longer doubted that he could easily become aware
of illegal activities such as sabotage or head-busting by hired
goon squads--the timehonored last resorts of labor and
management, and even more in vogue these days among radical
groups like the Earthists who, after all, couldn't call on
their "membership" to go on strike. What would a brontosaur do?
Stop eating? The CC could certainly look into the places where
the bombs were assembled, or could become aware, if he chose to
do so, of the intent of the bomb-thrower through readings from
his ubiquitous intercellular machines. Every year there were
calls to permit him precisely those powers, by the
law-and-order types. After all, the CC is a benevolent
watchdog, isn't he? Who has he ever hurt, except those who
deserved it? We could reduce crime to zero overnight if we'd
only take the chains off the CC.
I'd even leaned that way myself, in spite of the civil
libertarian objections. After my sojourn on Scarpa Island, I
found myself heartily on the other side of the question. I
suppose I was simply illustrating that old definition of a
liberal: a conservative that just got arrested. A conservative,
of course, is a liberal who just got mugged.
"You are cynical about this process," the CC was saying,
"because you've only seen it from the commercial side, and
between humans and creatures with a very basic brain structure.
It is much more interesting when the negotiations are conducted
between higher mammals. There have been some interesting
developments in Kenya, where lion/antelope arbitration has been
going on for five decades now. The lions, in particular, have
become quite adept at it. By now they know how to chose the
most skilled representative, a sort of shop steward, using the
same instincts that drive them to dominance battles. I really
believe they've grasped the concept that there must be lean
hunting times, that if all the antelope were killed they would
get nothing but commercially prepared chow--which they like
well enough, but is no substitute for the hunt. There is one
grizzled old veteran without any teeth who, year after year,
gives the antelope as hard a time at the bargaining fire as he
ever did on the savannah in his youth. He's a sort of Samuel
Gompers of the-"
I was spared any more details of this leonine Lenin's
exploits by David Earth, who finally bestirred himself. He got
to his feet, and pronghead stood hastily, destroying the polite
myth that he had anything to do with the proceedings. David
seldom attended contract talks with individual ranchers
anymore, he was too occupied with appearances promoting his
Earthist philosophy to the voters. On television, of course;
there would be no quicker way to disperse a political rally
than to have David walk into it.
"I think we really have a problem," he said, in his Jovian
voice. "The innocent creatures we represent have too long
chafed under your yoke. Their grievances are many and . . .
well, grievous."
If David had a weakness, that was it. He wasn't the
world's greatest speaker. I think he grew worse every year, as
language became more of a philosophical burden to him. One of
the planks of his platform--when the millennium was
achieved-was the abolition of language. He wanted us all to
sing like the birdies sing.
"To name only one," he boomed on, "you are one of only
three murderers of dinosaurs who--"
"Ranchers," Callie said.
"--who persist in using the brontosaur's natural enemy as
a means of instilling terror into-- "
"Herding," Callie gritted. "And no t-saur of mine has ever
so much as put a scratch on a stinking b-saur."
"If you persist in interrupting me, we'll never get
anywhere," David said, with a loving smile.
"No one will stand there are call me a murderer on my own
land. There are courts of libel, and you're about to get
dragged into one."
They regarded each other across the fire, knowing that
ninety-nine percent of threats and accusations made here were
simply wind, tossed out to gain an advantage or disconcert an
opponent-and hating each other so thoroughly that I never knew
when one would put a threat into action. Callie's face
reflected her opinions. David merely smiled, as if to say he
loved Callie dearly, but I knew him better than that. He hated
her so much that he inflicted himself on her every five years,
and I can think of little more cruel than that.
"We must seek closer communion with our friends," David
said, abruptly, and turned and walked away from the fire,
leaving his minion to trail along ignominiously behind him.
Callie sighed when he vanished into the darkness. She
stood up, stretched, boxed the air, getting the kinks out.
Bargaining is tough on the whole mind and body, but the best
thing to bring to the table is a tough bottom. Callie rubbed
hers, and leaned over the cooler she had brought with her. She
tossed me a can of beer, got one for herself, and sat on the
cooler.
"It's good to see you," she said. "We didn't get a chance
to talk the last time you were here." She frowned, remembering.
"Come to think of it, you took off without any warning. We got
to my office, you were gone. What happened?"
"A lot of things, Callie. That's what I came here for, to
. . . to talk them over with you, if I could. See if you could
offer me some advice."
She looked at me suspiciously. Well, she was in a
suspicious frame of mind, I understand that, dealing with the
intransigent union. But it went deeper. We had never managed to
talk very well. It was a depressing thought to realize, once
again, that when I had something important to share with
someone, she was the best that sprang to mind. I thought about
getting up and leaving right then. I know I hesitated, because
Callie did what she had so often done when I'd tried to talk to
her as a child: she changed the subject.
"That Brenda, she's a much nicer child than you give her
credit for. We had a long talk after we found out you'd left.
Do you have any idea how much she looks up to you?"
"Some idea. Callie, I--"
"She's putting herself through a history course that would
stagger you, all so she can keep up when you talk about
'ancient history.' I think it's hopeless. Some things you have
to live through to really understand. I know about the
twenty-first century because I was there. The twentieth
century, or the nineteenth can't ever seem as real to me,
though I've read a great deal about them."
"Sometimes I don't think last month seems real to Brenda."
"That's where you're wrong. She knows her recent history a
lot better than you'd think, and I'm talking about things that
happened fifty, a hundred years before she was born. We sat
around and talked . . . well, mostly I told her stories, I
guess. She seemed fascinated." She smiled at the memory. It
didn't surprise me that Brenda had found favor with Callie.
There are few qualities my mother values more in a human being
than a willing ear.
"I don't have much contact with young people. Like I was
telling her, we move in different social circles. I can't stand
their music and they think I'm a walking fossil. But after a
few hours she started opening up to me. It was almost like
having . . . well, a daughter."
She glanced at me, then took a long drink of beer. She
realized she had gone too far.
Normally, a remark like that would have been the start of
the seventy zillionth repeat of our most popular argument. That
night, I was willing to let it slide. I had much more important
things on my mind. When I didn't rise to it, she must have
finally realized how troubled I was, because she leaned forward
with her elbows on her knees and looked at me.
"Tell me about it," she said, and I did.
#
But not all of it.
I told her of my fight in the Blind Pig, and of my
conversation with the CC that led to the pseudoexperiences
still so fresh in my mind. I told her the CC had explained it
as a cure for depression, which it was, in a way. But I found
it impossible to come right out and tell her that I'd tried to
kill myself. Is there a more embarrassing admission one can
make? Maybe some people would think nothing of it, would
eagerly show off what the experts called hesitation
marks--scars on the wrist, bullet holes in the ceiling; I'd
been doing a little reading on the subject while sequestered in
Texas. If suicide really is a cry for help, it would seem
reasonable to be open and honest in revealing that one had
attempted it, in order to get some sympathy, some advice, some
commiseration, maybe just a hug.
Or some pity.
Am I simply too proud? I didn't think so. I searched
through my motives as well as I was able, and couldn't discern
any need for pity, which is what I'd surely get from Callie.
Perhaps that meant my attempts had actually been motivated by
depression, by a desire simply to live no longer. And that was
a depressing thought in itself.
I eventually wound down, leaving my story with a rather
obvious lack of resolution. I'm sure Callie spotted it right
away, but she said nothing for a while. I know the whole thing
was almost as difficult for her as it was for me. Intimacy
didn't seem to run in the family. I felt better about her than
I had in years, just for having listened to me as long as she
had.
She reached behind the cooler and brought out a can of
something which she poured on the fire. It flared up
immediately. She looked at me, and grinned.
"Rendered b-saur fat," she said. "Great for barbecues;
gets the fire blazing real quick. I've used it on the meeting
fires for eighty years. One of these days when he provokes me
enough, I'll tell David about it. I'm sure he'll love me in
spite of it. Will you toss some more of those logs on the fire?
Right behind you, there's a pile of them."
I did, and we sat watching them blaze.
"You're not telling me something," she said, at last. "If
you don't want to, that's your business. But you're the one who
wanted to talk."
"I know, I know. It's just very hard for me. There have
been a lot of things going on, a lot of new things I've
learned."
"I didn't know about that memory-dump technique," she
said. "I wouldn't have thought the CC could do that without
your permission." She didn't sound alarmed about it. Like
practically all Lunarians, she viewed the CC as a useful and
very intelligent slave. She would concede, along with everyone
else, that it was a being devoted to helping her in every
possible way. But that's where she parted company with her
fellow citizens, who also thought of the CC as the least
intrusive and most benevolent form of government ever devised.
The CC hadn't mentioned it, but his means of access to the
Double-C Bar Ranch was limited. This was no accident. Callie
had deliberately set up her electronics such that she could
function independent of the CC if the need should arise. All
communication had to come through a single cable to her Mark
III Husbander, which really ran the ranch. The link was further
laundered through a series of gadgets supplied by some of her
similarly paranoid friends, designed to filter out the
subversive virus, the time bomb, and the Chinese Fire
Drill--all forms of computer witchery I know nothing about
apart from their names.
It was wildly inefficient. I also suspected it was futile;
the CC was in here, talking to me, wasn't he? Because that was
the real reason for all the barriers, for the electronic
drawbridge Callie could theoretically raise and lower at will,
for the photo-etched moat she hoped to fill with cybernetic
crocodiles and the molten glitches she meant to dump into
invading programs. She claimed to be able to isolate her castle
with the flick of one switch. Bang! and the CC would be cut
adrift from its moorings to the larger datanet known as the
Central Computer.
Silly, isn't it? Well, I'd always thought so, until the CC
took control of my own mind. Callie had always thought that
way, and while she was in the minority, she wasn't alone.
Walter agreed with her, and a few other chronic malcontents
like the Heinleiners.
I was about to go on with my tale of woe, but Callie put
her finger to her lips.
"It'll have to wait a bit," she said. "The Kaiser of the
Chordates is returning."
#
Callie immediately went into a sneezing fit. David's
already avuncular expression became so benign it bordered on
the ludicrous. He was enjoying it, no doubt about it. He seated
himself and waited while Callie fumbled through her purse and
found a nasal spray. When she had dosed herself and blown her
nose, he smiled lovingly.
"I'm afraid your offer of ninety-eight murders is--" He
held up his hand as Callie started to retort. "Very well.
Ninety-eight creatures killed is simply unacceptable. After
further consultation, and hearing grievances that have
astounded me--and you well know I'm an old hand at this
business . . ."
"Ninety-seven," Callie said.
"Sixty," David countered.
Callie seemed to doubt for a moment that she had heard him
right. The word hung in the air between them, with at least as
much incendiary potential as the fire.
"You started at sixty," Callie said, quietly.
"And I've just returned us there."
"What's going on here? This isn't how it's done, and you
know it. There's no love lost between us, to put it mildly, but
I've always been able to do business with you. There are
certain accepted practices, certain understandings that if they
don't have the force of law, they certainly enjoy the stamp of
custom. Everyone recognizes that. It's called 'good faith,' and
I don't think you're practicing it here tonight."
"There will be no more business as usual," David intoned.
"You asked what's going on, and I'll tell you. My party has
grown steadily in strength throughout this decade. Tomorrow I'm
making a major speech in which I will outline new quotas which,
over a twenty-year period, are intended to phase out the
consumption of animal flesh entirely. It is insane, in this day
and age, to continue a primitive, unhealthy practice which
demeans us all. Killing and eating our fellow creatures is
nothing but cannibalism. We can no longer allow it, and call
ourselves civilized."
I was impressed. He hadn't stumbled over a single word,
which must have meant he'd written and memorized it. We were
getting a preview of tomorrow's big show.
"Shut up," Callie said.
"Countless scientific studies have proved that the eating
of meat--"
"Shut up," Callie said again, not raising her voice, but
putting something else into it that was a lot more powerful
than shouting. "You are on my land, and you will shut up, or I
will personally boot your raggedy old ass all the way to the
airlock and cycle you through it."
"You have no right to--"
Callie threw her beer in his face. She just tossed it
right through the fire, then threw the empty can over her
shoulder into the darkness. For a moment his face froze into an
expression as blank as I've ever seen on a human; it made my
skin crawl. Then he relaxed back into his usual attitude, that
of the wise old sage bemused by the squabbles of an imperfect
world, looking down on it with god-like love.
A mouse peeked out of the weeds of his beard to see what
all the commotion was about. It sampled one of the beer
droplets, found it good, and began imbibing at a rate it might
regret in the morning.
"I've squatted out here beside this damn fire for over
thirty hours," Callie said. "I'm not complaining about that;
it's a cost of doing business, and I'm used to it. But I am a
busy woman. If you'd told me about this when we sat down, if
you'd had the courtesy to do that, I could have kicked sand
into the fire and told you I'd see you in court. Because that's
where we're going, and I'll have an injunction slapped on you
before that beer can dry. The Labor Relations Board will have
something to say, too." She spread her hands in an eloquent
Italianate gesture. "I guess we have nothing further to talk
about."
"It's wrong," David said. "It's also unhealthy, and . . ."
While he was groping for a word to describe a horror so
huge, Callie jumped back in.
"Unhealthy, that's one I never could understand.
Brontosaurus meat is the healthiest single food product ever
developed. I ought to know; I helped build the genes back when
both of us were young. It's low in cholesterol, high in
vitamins and minerals . . ." She stopped, and looked curiously
at David.
"What's the use?" she asked herself. "I can't figure it
out. I've disliked you from the first time we met. I think you
are plainly crazy, egotistic, and dishonest. All that 'love'
crap. I think you live in a fantasy world where nobody should
ever get hurt. But one thing I've never accused you of, and
that's stupidity. And now you're doing something stupid, as if
you really think you can bring it off. Surely you realize this
thing can't work?" She looked concerned as she stared at him.
Almost as if she wished she could help him.
Nothing could be more certain to light a fire under David,
but I honestly don't think Callie meant to provoke him. By her
lights he really was planning to commit political suicide if he
intended to keep Lunarians from their bronto meat, not to
mention all other forms of flesh. And she never did understand
foolishness in other human beings.
He leaned forward, opened his mouth to begin another
prepared tirade, but he never got the chance. What I think
happened, and the tapes back me up on this, is some of the
fresh logs shifted. One of them fell into a pool of the
brontosaur fat Callie had poured on, a pool that had been
burning on the surface and getting hotter by the minute. The
sudden addition of hot coals caused the fat to pop, like it
will in a skillet. There was a shower of sparks and all four of
us were spattered by tiny droplets of boiling, burning grease
that clung like napalm. Since they were mostly quite small,
there were just a few sharp pains on my arms and my face, and I
quickly slapped them out. Callie and the man with the horns
were slapping at themselves as well.
David had a somewhat larger problem.
"He's on fire!" prong-head shouted. And it was true. The
top of his grass-covered head was burning merrily. David
himself wasn't aware of it yet, and looked around in confusion,
then stared up with a surprised expression I would always
remember, even if it hadn't been shown a hundred times on the
news.
"I need some water," he said, brushing at the flames and
hastily drawing his hand back. He seemed calm enough.
"Here, wait a minute," Callie shouted, and turned toward
the beverage cooler. I think she meant to douse him with more
beer, and I thought in passing how ironic it was that her
throwing the first beer may have saved him having to buy a new
face because it had soaked the grass of his beard. "Mario, get
him on the ground, try and smother it."
I didn't comment on her use of my old name. It didn't seem
the proper time for it. I started around the fire, reached for
David, and he shoved me away. It was purely a panic reaction. I
think it had started to hurt by then.
"Water! Where is the water?"
"I saw a stream over that way," said pronghead. David
looked wildly around. He had become a sinking ship: I saw three
voles, a garter snake, and a pair of finches burst from their
hiding places, and the fleeing insects were too numerous to
count. Some flew directly into the campfire. David behaved no
better. He started running in the direction his assistant had
pointed, which Mister Fireman could have told him was exactly
the wrong thing to do. Either he hadn't paid attention in
kindergarten or he'd lost all rational thought. Seeing how
brightly he lit up the night, I figured it was the latter.
"No! David, come back!" Callie had turned from the cooler,
having ripped the top from a can of beer. "There's no water
that way!" She threw the can after him, but it fell short.
David was setting Olympic records in his sprint for the stream
that wasn't there. "Mario! Catch him!"
I didn't think I could, but I had to try. He'd be easy to
follow, unless he burned to the ground. I took off, pounding
the dirt with my feet, thanking the generations of brontosaurs
who had packed it so hard. David had run into a grove of
cycadoids and I was just getting to the edge of them when I
heard Callie shout again.
"Come back! Hurry, Mario, come back!" I slowed almost to a
stop, and became aware of a disturbing sensation. The ground
was shaking. I looked back at the campfire. Callie was standing
looking out into the darkness. She'd turned on a powerful hand
torch and was sweeping it back and forth. The beam caught a
brontosaur in full charge. It stopped, blinded and confused,
and then picked a direction at random and rumbled away.
An eighty-ton shadow thundered by, not three meters to my
right. I started moving back to the campfire, scanning the
darkness, aware I wouldn't get much warning. Halfway there,
another behemoth thundered into the council site. It actually
stepped in the fire, which wasn't to its liking at all. It
squealed, wheeled, and took off more or less toward me. I
watched it coming, figured it would keep moving that way unless
stopped by a major mountain chain, and dodged to my left. The
beast kept going and was swallowed by the night.
I knew enough about b-saurs to know not to expect rational
behavior from them. They were already upset by the
negotiations. Images of tsaurs and feelings of starvation must
have addled their tiny brains considerably. It would have taken
a lot less stimulus than a burning, screaming David Earth to
stampede them. He must have hit them like a stick of dynamite.
And when b-saurs panic, what little sense they possess deserts
them completely. They start off in random directions. There
seems to be an instinct that tends to draw them into a
thundering group, eventually headed in the same direction, but
they don't see well at night, and thus couldn't easily find
each other. The result was seventy or eighty walking mountains
going off in all directions. Very little could stand in their
way.
Certainly not me. I hurried to Callie's side. She was
talking into a pocket communicator, calling for hovercraft as
she stabbed the powerful light beam this way and that. Usually
it was enough to turn the beasts. When it was not, we stepped
very lively indeed.
Before long she picked out a medium-sized cow headed more
or less in our direction, and turned the beam away from it. She
slapped a saur-hook into my hand, and we watched it approach.
Where's the safest place to be in a dinosaur stampede? On
a dinosaur's back. Actually, the best place would have been on
one of the hovercraft, whose lights we could see approaching,
but you take what you can get. We waited for the hind legs to
get past us, dug our hooks into the cow's tail, and swung
ourselves up. A dinosaur doesn't precisely like being hooked,
but her perceptions of pain that far back on her body are dim
and diffused, and this one had other things on her tiny mind.
We scrambled up the tail until we could get a grip on the
fleshy folds of the back. Don't try this at home, by the way.
Callie was an old hand at it, and though I hadn't hooked a saur
in seventy years, the skills were still there. I only wobbled
for a moment, and Callie was there to steady me.
So we rode, and waited. In due time the bronto wore
herself out, rumbled to a stop, and started cropping leaves
from the top of a cycad, probably wondering by now what all the
fuss had been about, if she remembered it at all. We climbed
down, were met by a hover, and got into that.
#
Callie had the "sun" turned on to aid the search. We found
prong-head fairly quickly. He was kneeling in a muddy spot,
shaking uncontrollably. He had survived with nothing but luck
to aid him. I wondered if he ever loved animals quite so much,
or in quite the same way, after that night.
Say what you will about Callie, her worries for the lad
were genuine, and her relief at finding him alive and unhurt
was apparent even to him, in his distracted condition. For that
matter, though David Earth might call her a cold-blooded
killer, she hadn't wished death even on him. She simply
measured human life and animal life on different scales,
something David could never do.
"Let's get him out of here and find David," she said, and
grabbed the young man by his arm. "He's going to need a lot of
medical attention, if he made it." Prong-head resisted, pulling
away from her grasp, remaining on his knees. He pointed down
into the mud. I looked, and then looked away.
"David has returned to the food-chain," he said, and
fainted.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
The next several days were fairly hectic for me. I was
kept so busy I had little time to think or worry about the CC
or entertain thoughts of suicide. The whole idea seemed
completely alien.
Since I work for a print medium I tend not to think in
terms of pictures. My stories are meant to be written,
transmitted to a subscriber-rented scrambler-equipped newspad,
where they will be screened and read by that part of the
population that still reads. Walter employs others to shorten,
simplify, and read aloud his reporters' stories for the illit
channel of the newspad. There are of course all-visual news
services, and now there is direct interface, but so far at
least, D.I. is not something most people do for relaxation and
entertainment. Reading is still the preferred method of
information input for a large minority of Lunarians. It is
slower than D.I., but much quicker and in much greater depth
than pure television news.
But the News Nipple is an electronic medium, and many of
the stories we run come with film clips. Thus did the newspaper
manage to find a government-subsidized, yearly more perilous
niche for itself in the era of television. Pundits keep
predicting the death of the newspad, and year by year it
struggles on, maintained mostly by people who don't want too
much change in their lives.
I tend to forget about the holocam in my left eye. Its
contents are dumped at the same time I enter my story into the
Nipple's editorial computer, and a picture editor usually
fastforwards through it and picks a still shot or a few seconds
of moving images to back up my words. I remember when it was
first installed I worried that those editors would be seeing
things that I'd prefer to be private; after all, the thing
operates all the time, and has a six-hour memory. But the CC
had assured me there was a discrimination program in the main
computer that erased all the irrelevant pictures before a human
ever saw them. (Now it occurred to me to wonder about that. It
had never bothered me that the CC might see the full tapes, but
I'd never thought of him as a snoop before.)
The holocam is a partly mechanical, partly biologic device
about the size of a fingernail clipping that is implanted
inside the eye, way over to one side, out of the way of your
peripheral vision. A semi-silvered mirror is hung in the middle
of the eye, somewhere near the focal point, and reflects part
of the light entering the eye over to the holocam. When you
first have one put in you notice a slight diminution of light
sensitivity in that eye, but the brain is such that it quickly
adjusts and in a few days you never notice it again. It causes
my pupil to look red, and it glows faintly in the dark.
It had been operating when David Earth caught fire,
naturally. I didn't even think of it during subsequent events,
not until David's body had been removed and taken to wherever
Earthists are disposed of. Then I realized I had what might be
the biggest story of my career. And a scoop, as well.
Real death captured by a camera is always guaranteed to
make the front feed of the newspad. The death of a celebrity
would provide fodder for Walter's second-string feature writers
for months to come; anything to have an excuse to run once more
that glorious, horrible image of David's head wreathed in fire,
and the even more horrifying results of being crushed beneath a
stampeding brontosaur.
News footage is exclusive to the paper that filmed it for
a period of twenty-four hours. After that, there is a similar
period when it may be leased for minutes or hours, or sold
outright. After forty-eight hours it all becomes public domain.
A major metropolitan newspaper is geared to exploit these
two critical periods to the utmost. For the first day, when we
could exploit my film exclusively, we made the death of Earth
seem like the biggest story since the marriage of Silvio and
Marina twenty-five years ago, or their divorce one year later,
or the Invasion of the Planet Earth, take your pick. Those are
commonly thought to be the three biggest news stories of all
time, the only real difference in their magnitude being that
two of them were well-covered, and one was not. This story was
nowhere near that big, of course, but you'd never have known it
to read our breathless prose and listen to our frantic
commentators.
I was the center of much of this coverage. There was no
question of sleeping. Since I'm not an on-screen
personality--which means I'm an indifferent speaker, and the
camera does not love me--I spent most of the time sitting
across from our star anchor and answering his questions. Most
of this was fed out live, and often took as much as fifteen
minutes at the top of each hour. For the next fifteen minutes
we showed the reports sent back by the cadres of camerapeople
who descended on Callie's ranch and shot everything from
pictures of the killer dinosaur's bloody foot, to the corpses
of the three b-saurs killed in the stampede, to the still-vivid
imprint of David's body in the mud, to interviews with every
ranch hand who'd ever worked for Callie, even though none of
them had seen anything but the dead body.
I thought Walter was going to explode when he learned that
Callie refused to be interviewed under any circumstances or for
any amount of money. He sent me to the ranch to cajole her. I
went, knowing it would do no good. He threatened to have her
arrested; in his rage, he seemed to believe that refusing to
cooperate with the media-and with him in particular--was
illegal. For her part, Callie made several nasty calls
demanding that we stop using her image, and someone had to read
her the relevant parts of the law that said she couldn't do
anything about it. She rang me up and called me a Judas, among
other things. I don't know what she expected me to do with the
biggest story of my life; sit on it, I guess. I called her a
few things back, just as harsh. I think she was concerned about
her possible liability in the incident, but the main reason was
her loathing for the popular press--something I couldn't
entirely disagree with her on. I have wondered, from time to
time, if that's why I got into this business. Nasty thought,
that.
Anyway, I decided it would be pointless to seek her advice
on the parts of my story I hadn't gotten around to telling her,
for at least a year or so. Make that five years.
The next day was spent farming the story out to competing
rags and vids, but on our terms. The price was high, but
willingly paid. They knew that next time they were as likely to
be on the selling end, and would gouge appropriately. As was
standard practice, I was always included as part of the deal,
so I could mention the Nipple as often and as blatantly as
possible while on live feeds. So I talked myself into a sore
throat sitting beside endless commentators, columnists, and
similar sorts, while the by now dated footage ran yet another
time.
The only person who got as much exposure as I did during
those two days was Eartha Lowe. A movement as radical as the
Earthists will spawn splinter groups like a sow whelps piglets.
It's a law of nature. Eartha was the leader of the largest one,
also called the Earthists, purely to give headaches to poor
newspapermen, I'm convinced. Some of us distinguished them as
Earthist(David) and Earthist(Lowe), others tried the
abomination of Eartha-ists. Most of us simply called them the
Earthists and the Other Earthists, something guaranteed to
provoke a wailing woodnote wild from Eartha, because there was
no need to explain who the "Others" were.
David had died politically intestate. There was no heir
apparent in his organization. Increasingly, people were not
planning for their own deaths, because they simply didn't
expect to die. Perhaps that explains the mordant fascination
with violent images in popular entertainment and the clamor for
more details about real deaths when they occur. We haven't
achieved immortality yet. Maybe we never will. People are
reassured to see death as something that happens to somebody
else, and not often at that.
Eartha Lowe was standing on every soapbox that would
support her not-inconsiderable weight, welcoming the strays
back into the fold. In her version, it was David who had split
away. Who cared that he had taken ninety percent of the flock
with him? We were told that Eartha had always loved David (no
surprise; they had both professed to love every living
creature, though David had loved Eartha more on the level of,
say, a nematode or a virus, not so much as the family dog) and
Eartha had returned his affection in spades. I couldn't follow
all the doctrinal differences. The big one seemed to be
Eartha's contention that any proper Earthist should be in the
female image, to be a mirror of Mother Earth. Or something like
that.
All in all, it was the goldarndest, Barnum-andBaileyest,
rib-stickinest, rough-and-tumblest infernal foofaraw of a media
circus anybody had seen since grandpaw chased the possum down
the road and lost his store teeth, and I was heartily sorry to
have been a part of it.
When the two-day purgatory was over, I collapsed into my
bed for twelve hours. When I woke up, I gave some thought once
more to getting out of the business. Was it a root cause of my
self-destructive tendencies? One would have to think that
hating what I did might contribute to feelings of
worthlessness, and thus to thoughts of ending it all. I tabled
the matter for the moment. I have to admit that though I may
feel disdain for the things we do and the manner in which we do
them, there is a heady thrill to the news business when things
are really happening. Not that exciting things happen all that
often, even in my line of work. Most news is of the
notmuch-happened-today variety, tricked up in various sexy
lies. But when it does happen, it's exhilarating. And there's
an even guiltier pleasure in being where things are happening,
in being the first to know something. About the only other line
of work where you can get as close to the center of things is
politics, and even I draw the line at that. I have some
standards left.
Talking to Callie had been a bust, advice-wise if not
career-wise. But in searching for sources of dissatisfaction
one thing had grown increasingly clear to me. I was wearing my
body like a badly fitted pair of trousers, the kind that bind
you in the crotch. A year as a female, ersatz though the
experience had been, had shown me it was time for a Change.
Past time, probably by several years.
Could that have been the fountain of my discontent? Could
it have been a contributing factor? Doubtful, and possibly.
Even if it had nothing to do with it, it wouldn't hurt to go
ahead and get it done, so I could be comfortable again. Hell,
it was no big deal.
#
When the terribly, terribly fashionable decide the old
genitals are getting to be rather a bore, don't you know, they
phone the chauffeur and have the old bones driven down to
Change Alley.
Normally, when it came time for a Change, I would hie me
to some small neighborhood operation. They are all
board-certified, after all, one just as able as another to do
the necessary nipping and tucking. A confluence of
circumstances this time decided me to visit the street where
the elite meet. One was that my pockets were bulging with the
shekels Walter had showered on me in the form of bonuses for
the Burning Earth story. The other was that I knew Darling
Bobbie when he was just Robert Darling of Crazy Bob's Budget
Barbering and Tattoo Parlor, back when he did sex changes as a
sideline to bring in more money. He'd had a little shop on the
Leystrasse, a determinedly working-class commercial corridor
with a third of the shopfronts boarded up and plastered with
handbills, running through one of the less fashionable
neighborhoods of King City. He'd been sandwiched between a
bordello and a taco stand, and his sign had read "Finast Gender
Alteration On The Leystrasse--E-Z Credit Terms." None of which
was news to anyone: his was the only Change shop in the area,
and you couldn't offer so expensive a service around there
without being prepared to finance. Not that he did a lot of it.
Laborers can't afford frequent sex changes and, as a group, are
not that inclined to question Mother Nature's toss of the dice,
much less flit back and forth from one sex to the other. He did
much better with the tattooing, which was cheap and appealed to
his clientele. He told me he had regulars who had their entire
bodies done every few weeks.
That had been over twenty-five years ago, when I had my
last previous sex change. In that time, Crazy Bob had come up
in the world. He had invented some body frill or other--I can't
even recall what it was now, these things come and go so
quickly they make mayflies seem elderly--that was "discovered"
by slumming socialites. He was elevated overnight into the new
guru of secondary sexual attributes. Fashion writers now
attended his openings and wrote knowingly about the new
season's whimsy. Body styling would probably never be as big or
influential as the rag trade, but a few practitioners to the
hi-thrust set had carved themselves a niche in the world of
fashion.
And Crazy Bob had spent the last ten years trying to make
people forget about the little cock shop next door to the
Jalapen~o Heaven.
Change Alley is a ridiculous name for the place, but it
does branch off of the fivekilometer gulch of glitz known as
Hadleyplatz. For fifty years the Platz, as everyone knew it,
had been the inheritor of such places as Saville Row, Fifth
Avenue, Kimberly Road, and Chimki Prospekt. It was the place to
go if you were looking for solid gold toenail clippers, not so
great for annual white sales. They didn't offer credit on the
Platz, E-Z or otherwise. If the door didn't have your gencode
in its memory banks along with an up-to-the-millisecond
analysis of your pocketbook, it simply didn't open for you.
There were no painted signs to be seen, and almost no
holosigns. Advertising on the Platz ran to small logos in the
bottom corners of plate glass windows, or brilliantly-buffed
gold plaques mounted at eye level.
The Alley branched away from the main promenade at a sharp
angle and dead-ended about a hundred meters later in a cluster
of exclusive restaurants. Along the way were a handful of small
storefronts operated by the handful of very tasteful hucksters
who could persuade their clientele to part with ten times the
going rate for a body make-over so they could have "Body By
So-and-so" engraved on the nail of their pinky finger.
There were holosigns in the Alley shops, showing each
designer's ideas of what the fashionable man or woman was being
these days. The tastemongers back on the main drag liked to say
the Alley was off the Platz, but not of the Platz. Still, it
was all a far cry from the tattoo templates filling the windows
of the Budget Barber.
I wondered if I ought to go in. I wondered if I could go
in. Bob and I had been drinking buddies for a while, but we'd
lost contact after his move. I pressed my hand to the
identiplate, felt the tiny pressure as a probe scraped away a
minuscule amount of dead skin. The machine seemed to hesitate;
perhaps I'd be sent around to the tradesmen's entrance. Then it
swung open. There should have been a flourish of trumpets, I
thought, but that would have been too demonstrative for the
Alley.
"Hildy! Enchanting, enchanting old boy. So good to see
you." He had come out of some concealed back room and covered
the distance to me in three long strides. He pumped my hand
enthusiastically, looking me up and down and adopting a dubious
air. "Good heavens, am I responsible for that? You came just in
time, my friend. Not a moment too soon. But don't worry, I can
fix it, cousin Bobbie will take care of everything. Just put
yourself in my hands."
I suddenly wondered if I wanted to be in his hands. I
thought he was laying it on a trifle thick, but it had been a
while since I'd seen him, and I'm sure he had appearances to
maintain. The gushing, the mincing, all were nods toward
tradition, something practiced by many in his line of work,
just as lawyers tried to develop a sober facade suitable for
the weighty matters they dealt in. Back before Changing, the
fashion world had been dominated by homosexual men. Sexuality
being as complicated as it is, with hundreds of identified
orientations--not to mention ULTRATingle--it was impossible to
know much about anyone else's preferences without talking it
over and spelling it out. Bob, or perhaps I should say Darling,
was hetero-oriented, male born and male leaning, which meant
that, left to his own choice, would be male most of the time
with occasional excursions into a female body, and no matter
his current sex would prefer the company of the opposite.
But his profession almost demanded that he Change four or
five times a year, just as the rag merchants had better wear
their own designs. Today he was male, and didn't look any
different from when I had know him. At least he didn't at
first. When I looked more closely, I saw there were a thousand
subtle alterations, none of them radical enough so his friends
wouldn't recognize him on the street.
"You don't have to take the blame," I told him, as he took
my elbow and guided me toward something he called a "Counseling
Suite." "Maybe you don't remember, but I brought in all the
seem pointless without gratifying work."
That shut me up for a while. I knew only too well how
pointless life could seem.
"And he really does love animals," the CC added. "He hurts
when he thinks of one dying. I shouldn't be telling you any of
this, as I'm prohibited from commenting on the qualities, good
or bad, of human citizens. But in view of our recent
relationship, I thought . . ." He let it trail off, unfinished.
Enough of that.
"What about death?" I asked him. "You mentioned hunger and
the image of a predator. I'd think you'd get a stronger
reaction if you planted the idea of their actual deaths in
their minds."
"Much more of a reaction than you'd want. Predators and
hunger imply death, but inspire less fear than the actual
event. These negotiations are quite touchy; I've tried many
times to talk Callie into holding them indoors. But she says
that if 'salad-head' isn't afraid to pow-wow in the middle of
the herd, she isn't either. No, the death-image is the nuclear
weapon of predator/prey relations. It's usually a prelude to
either an attempt at union-busting, or a boycott."
"Or something even more serious."
"So I infer. Of course, I have no proof."
I wondered about that. Maybe the CC was leveling with me
when he said he only spied into private spaces in circumstances
as unusual as my own. Or into minds, for that matter. I
certainly no longer doubted that he could easily become aware
of illegal activities such as sabotage or head-busting by hired
goon squads--the timehonored last resorts of labor and
management, and even more in vogue these days among radical
groups like the Earthists who, after all, couldn't call on
their "membership" to go on strike. What would a brontosaur do?
Stop eating? The CC could certainly look into the places where
the bombs were assembled, or could become aware, if he chose to
do so, of the intent of the bomb-thrower through readings from
his ubiquitous intercellular machines. Every year there were
calls to permit him precisely those powers, by the
law-and-order types. After all, the CC is a benevolent
watchdog, isn't he? Who has he ever hurt, except those who
deserved it? We could reduce crime to zero overnight if we'd
only take the chains off the CC.
I'd even leaned that way myself, in spite of the civil
libertarian objections. After my sojourn on Scarpa Island, I
found myself heartily on the other side of the question. I
suppose I was simply illustrating that old definition of a
liberal: a conservative that just got arrested. A conservative,
of course, is a liberal who just got mugged.
"You are cynical about this process," the CC was saying,
"because you've only seen it from the commercial side, and
between humans and creatures with a very basic brain structure.
It is much more interesting when the negotiations are conducted
between higher mammals. There have been some interesting
developments in Kenya, where lion/antelope arbitration has been
going on for five decades now. The lions, in particular, have
become quite adept at it. By now they know how to chose the
most skilled representative, a sort of shop steward, using the
same instincts that drive them to dominance battles. I really
believe they've grasped the concept that there must be lean
hunting times, that if all the antelope were killed they would
get nothing but commercially prepared chow--which they like
well enough, but is no substitute for the hunt. There is one
grizzled old veteran without any teeth who, year after year,
gives the antelope as hard a time at the bargaining fire as he
ever did on the savannah in his youth. He's a sort of Samuel
Gompers of the-"
I was spared any more details of this leonine Lenin's
exploits by David Earth, who finally bestirred himself. He got
to his feet, and pronghead stood hastily, destroying the polite
myth that he had anything to do with the proceedings. David
seldom attended contract talks with individual ranchers
anymore, he was too occupied with appearances promoting his
Earthist philosophy to the voters. On television, of course;
there would be no quicker way to disperse a political rally
than to have David walk into it.
"I think we really have a problem," he said, in his Jovian
voice. "The innocent creatures we represent have too long
chafed under your yoke. Their grievances are many and . . .
well, grievous."
If David had a weakness, that was it. He wasn't the
world's greatest speaker. I think he grew worse every year, as
language became more of a philosophical burden to him. One of
the planks of his platform--when the millennium was
achieved-was the abolition of language. He wanted us all to
sing like the birdies sing.
"To name only one," he boomed on, "you are one of only
three murderers of dinosaurs who--"
"Ranchers," Callie said.
"--who persist in using the brontosaur's natural enemy as
a means of instilling terror into-- "
"Herding," Callie gritted. "And no t-saur of mine has ever
so much as put a scratch on a stinking b-saur."
"If you persist in interrupting me, we'll never get
anywhere," David said, with a loving smile.
"No one will stand there are call me a murderer on my own
land. There are courts of libel, and you're about to get
dragged into one."
They regarded each other across the fire, knowing that
ninety-nine percent of threats and accusations made here were
simply wind, tossed out to gain an advantage or disconcert an
opponent-and hating each other so thoroughly that I never knew
when one would put a threat into action. Callie's face
reflected her opinions. David merely smiled, as if to say he
loved Callie dearly, but I knew him better than that. He hated
her so much that he inflicted himself on her every five years,
and I can think of little more cruel than that.
"We must seek closer communion with our friends," David
said, abruptly, and turned and walked away from the fire,
leaving his minion to trail along ignominiously behind him.
Callie sighed when he vanished into the darkness. She
stood up, stretched, boxed the air, getting the kinks out.
Bargaining is tough on the whole mind and body, but the best
thing to bring to the table is a tough bottom. Callie rubbed
hers, and leaned over the cooler she had brought with her. She
tossed me a can of beer, got one for herself, and sat on the
cooler.
"It's good to see you," she said. "We didn't get a chance
to talk the last time you were here." She frowned, remembering.
"Come to think of it, you took off without any warning. We got
to my office, you were gone. What happened?"
"A lot of things, Callie. That's what I came here for, to
. . . to talk them over with you, if I could. See if you could
offer me some advice."
She looked at me suspiciously. Well, she was in a
suspicious frame of mind, I understand that, dealing with the
intransigent union. But it went deeper. We had never managed to
talk very well. It was a depressing thought to realize, once
again, that when I had something important to share with
someone, she was the best that sprang to mind. I thought about
getting up and leaving right then. I know I hesitated, because
Callie did what she had so often done when I'd tried to talk to
her as a child: she changed the subject.
"That Brenda, she's a much nicer child than you give her
credit for. We had a long talk after we found out you'd left.
Do you have any idea how much she looks up to you?"
"Some idea. Callie, I--"
"She's putting herself through a history course that would
stagger you, all so she can keep up when you talk about
'ancient history.' I think it's hopeless. Some things you have
to live through to really understand. I know about the
twenty-first century because I was there. The twentieth
century, or the nineteenth can't ever seem as real to me,
though I've read a great deal about them."
"Sometimes I don't think last month seems real to Brenda."
"That's where you're wrong. She knows her recent history a
lot better than you'd think, and I'm talking about things that
happened fifty, a hundred years before she was born. We sat
around and talked . . . well, mostly I told her stories, I
guess. She seemed fascinated." She smiled at the memory. It
didn't surprise me that Brenda had found favor with Callie.
There are few qualities my mother values more in a human being
than a willing ear.
"I don't have much contact with young people. Like I was
telling her, we move in different social circles. I can't stand
their music and they think I'm a walking fossil. But after a
few hours she started opening up to me. It was almost like
having . . . well, a daughter."
She glanced at me, then took a long drink of beer. She
realized she had gone too far.
Normally, a remark like that would have been the start of
the seventy zillionth repeat of our most popular argument. That
night, I was willing to let it slide. I had much more important
things on my mind. When I didn't rise to it, she must have
finally realized how troubled I was, because she leaned forward
with her elbows on her knees and looked at me.
"Tell me about it," she said, and I did.
#
But not all of it.
I told her of my fight in the Blind Pig, and of my
conversation with the CC that led to the pseudoexperiences
still so fresh in my mind. I told her the CC had explained it
as a cure for depression, which it was, in a way. But I found
it impossible to come right out and tell her that I'd tried to
kill myself. Is there a more embarrassing admission one can
make? Maybe some people would think nothing of it, would
eagerly show off what the experts called hesitation
marks--scars on the wrist, bullet holes in the ceiling; I'd
been doing a little reading on the subject while sequestered in
Texas. If suicide really is a cry for help, it would seem
reasonable to be open and honest in revealing that one had
attempted it, in order to get some sympathy, some advice, some
commiseration, maybe just a hug.
Or some pity.
Am I simply too proud? I didn't think so. I searched
through my motives as well as I was able, and couldn't discern
any need for pity, which is what I'd surely get from Callie.
Perhaps that meant my attempts had actually been motivated by
depression, by a desire simply to live no longer. And that was
a depressing thought in itself.
I eventually wound down, leaving my story with a rather
obvious lack of resolution. I'm sure Callie spotted it right
away, but she said nothing for a while. I know the whole thing
was almost as difficult for her as it was for me. Intimacy
didn't seem to run in the family. I felt better about her than
I had in years, just for having listened to me as long as she
had.
She reached behind the cooler and brought out a can of
something which she poured on the fire. It flared up
immediately. She looked at me, and grinned.
"Rendered b-saur fat," she said. "Great for barbecues;
gets the fire blazing real quick. I've used it on the meeting
fires for eighty years. One of these days when he provokes me
enough, I'll tell David about it. I'm sure he'll love me in
spite of it. Will you toss some more of those logs on the fire?
Right behind you, there's a pile of them."
I did, and we sat watching them blaze.
"You're not telling me something," she said, at last. "If
you don't want to, that's your business. But you're the one who
wanted to talk."
"I know, I know. It's just very hard for me. There have
been a lot of things going on, a lot of new things I've
learned."
"I didn't know about that memory-dump technique," she
said. "I wouldn't have thought the CC could do that without
your permission." She didn't sound alarmed about it. Like
practically all Lunarians, she viewed the CC as a useful and
very intelligent slave. She would concede, along with everyone
else, that it was a being devoted to helping her in every
possible way. But that's where she parted company with her
fellow citizens, who also thought of the CC as the least
intrusive and most benevolent form of government ever devised.
The CC hadn't mentioned it, but his means of access to the
Double-C Bar Ranch was limited. This was no accident. Callie
had deliberately set up her electronics such that she could
function independent of the CC if the need should arise. All
communication had to come through a single cable to her Mark
III Husbander, which really ran the ranch. The link was further
laundered through a series of gadgets supplied by some of her
similarly paranoid friends, designed to filter out the
subversive virus, the time bomb, and the Chinese Fire
Drill--all forms of computer witchery I know nothing about
apart from their names.
It was wildly inefficient. I also suspected it was futile;
the CC was in here, talking to me, wasn't he? Because that was
the real reason for all the barriers, for the electronic
drawbridge Callie could theoretically raise and lower at will,
for the photo-etched moat she hoped to fill with cybernetic
crocodiles and the molten glitches she meant to dump into
invading programs. She claimed to be able to isolate her castle
with the flick of one switch. Bang! and the CC would be cut
adrift from its moorings to the larger datanet known as the
Central Computer.
Silly, isn't it? Well, I'd always thought so, until the CC
took control of my own mind. Callie had always thought that
way, and while she was in the minority, she wasn't alone.
Walter agreed with her, and a few other chronic malcontents
like the Heinleiners.
I was about to go on with my tale of woe, but Callie put
her finger to her lips.
"It'll have to wait a bit," she said. "The Kaiser of the
Chordates is returning."
#
Callie immediately went into a sneezing fit. David's
already avuncular expression became so benign it bordered on
the ludicrous. He was enjoying it, no doubt about it. He seated
himself and waited while Callie fumbled through her purse and
found a nasal spray. When she had dosed herself and blown her
nose, he smiled lovingly.
"I'm afraid your offer of ninety-eight murders is--" He
held up his hand as Callie started to retort. "Very well.
Ninety-eight creatures killed is simply unacceptable. After
further consultation, and hearing grievances that have
astounded me--and you well know I'm an old hand at this
business . . ."
"Ninety-seven," Callie said.
"Sixty," David countered.
Callie seemed to doubt for a moment that she had heard him
right. The word hung in the air between them, with at least as
much incendiary potential as the fire.
"You started at sixty," Callie said, quietly.
"And I've just returned us there."
"What's going on here? This isn't how it's done, and you
know it. There's no love lost between us, to put it mildly, but
I've always been able to do business with you. There are
certain accepted practices, certain understandings that if they
don't have the force of law, they certainly enjoy the stamp of
custom. Everyone recognizes that. It's called 'good faith,' and
I don't think you're practicing it here tonight."
"There will be no more business as usual," David intoned.
"You asked what's going on, and I'll tell you. My party has
grown steadily in strength throughout this decade. Tomorrow I'm
making a major speech in which I will outline new quotas which,
over a twenty-year period, are intended to phase out the
consumption of animal flesh entirely. It is insane, in this day
and age, to continue a primitive, unhealthy practice which
demeans us all. Killing and eating our fellow creatures is
nothing but cannibalism. We can no longer allow it, and call
ourselves civilized."
I was impressed. He hadn't stumbled over a single word,
which must have meant he'd written and memorized it. We were
getting a preview of tomorrow's big show.
"Shut up," Callie said.
"Countless scientific studies have proved that the eating
of meat--"
"Shut up," Callie said again, not raising her voice, but
putting something else into it that was a lot more powerful
than shouting. "You are on my land, and you will shut up, or I
will personally boot your raggedy old ass all the way to the
airlock and cycle you through it."
"You have no right to--"
Callie threw her beer in his face. She just tossed it
right through the fire, then threw the empty can over her
shoulder into the darkness. For a moment his face froze into an
expression as blank as I've ever seen on a human; it made my
skin crawl. Then he relaxed back into his usual attitude, that
of the wise old sage bemused by the squabbles of an imperfect
world, looking down on it with god-like love.
A mouse peeked out of the weeds of his beard to see what
all the commotion was about. It sampled one of the beer
droplets, found it good, and began imbibing at a rate it might
regret in the morning.
"I've squatted out here beside this damn fire for over
thirty hours," Callie said. "I'm not complaining about that;
it's a cost of doing business, and I'm used to it. But I am a
busy woman. If you'd told me about this when we sat down, if
you'd had the courtesy to do that, I could have kicked sand
into the fire and told you I'd see you in court. Because that's
where we're going, and I'll have an injunction slapped on you
before that beer can dry. The Labor Relations Board will have
something to say, too." She spread her hands in an eloquent
Italianate gesture. "I guess we have nothing further to talk
about."
"It's wrong," David said. "It's also unhealthy, and . . ."
While he was groping for a word to describe a horror so
huge, Callie jumped back in.
"Unhealthy, that's one I never could understand.
Brontosaurus meat is the healthiest single food product ever
developed. I ought to know; I helped build the genes back when
both of us were young. It's low in cholesterol, high in
vitamins and minerals . . ." She stopped, and looked curiously
at David.
"What's the use?" she asked herself. "I can't figure it
out. I've disliked you from the first time we met. I think you
are plainly crazy, egotistic, and dishonest. All that 'love'
crap. I think you live in a fantasy world where nobody should
ever get hurt. But one thing I've never accused you of, and
that's stupidity. And now you're doing something stupid, as if
you really think you can bring it off. Surely you realize this
thing can't work?" She looked concerned as she stared at him.
Almost as if she wished she could help him.
Nothing could be more certain to light a fire under David,
but I honestly don't think Callie meant to provoke him. By her
lights he really was planning to commit political suicide if he
intended to keep Lunarians from their bronto meat, not to
mention all other forms of flesh. And she never did understand
foolishness in other human beings.
He leaned forward, opened his mouth to begin another
prepared tirade, but he never got the chance. What I think
happened, and the tapes back me up on this, is some of the
fresh logs shifted. One of them fell into a pool of the
brontosaur fat Callie had poured on, a pool that had been
burning on the surface and getting hotter by the minute. The
sudden addition of hot coals caused the fat to pop, like it
will in a skillet. There was a shower of sparks and all four of
us were spattered by tiny droplets of boiling, burning grease
that clung like napalm. Since they were mostly quite small,
there were just a few sharp pains on my arms and my face, and I
quickly slapped them out. Callie and the man with the horns
were slapping at themselves as well.
David had a somewhat larger problem.
"He's on fire!" prong-head shouted. And it was true. The
top of his grass-covered head was burning merrily. David
himself wasn't aware of it yet, and looked around in confusion,
then stared up with a surprised expression I would always
remember, even if it hadn't been shown a hundred times on the
news.
"I need some water," he said, brushing at the flames and
hastily drawing his hand back. He seemed calm enough.
"Here, wait a minute," Callie shouted, and turned toward
the beverage cooler. I think she meant to douse him with more
beer, and I thought in passing how ironic it was that her
throwing the first beer may have saved him having to buy a new
face because it had soaked the grass of his beard. "Mario, get
him on the ground, try and smother it."
I didn't comment on her use of my old name. It didn't seem
the proper time for it. I started around the fire, reached for
David, and he shoved me away. It was purely a panic reaction. I
think it had started to hurt by then.
"Water! Where is the water?"
"I saw a stream over that way," said pronghead. David
looked wildly around. He had become a sinking ship: I saw three
voles, a garter snake, and a pair of finches burst from their
hiding places, and the fleeing insects were too numerous to
count. Some flew directly into the campfire. David behaved no
better. He started running in the direction his assistant had
pointed, which Mister Fireman could have told him was exactly
the wrong thing to do. Either he hadn't paid attention in
kindergarten or he'd lost all rational thought. Seeing how
brightly he lit up the night, I figured it was the latter.
"No! David, come back!" Callie had turned from the cooler,
having ripped the top from a can of beer. "There's no water
that way!" She threw the can after him, but it fell short.
David was setting Olympic records in his sprint for the stream
that wasn't there. "Mario! Catch him!"
I didn't think I could, but I had to try. He'd be easy to
follow, unless he burned to the ground. I took off, pounding
the dirt with my feet, thanking the generations of brontosaurs
who had packed it so hard. David had run into a grove of
cycadoids and I was just getting to the edge of them when I
heard Callie shout again.
"Come back! Hurry, Mario, come back!" I slowed almost to a
stop, and became aware of a disturbing sensation. The ground
was shaking. I looked back at the campfire. Callie was standing
looking out into the darkness. She'd turned on a powerful hand
torch and was sweeping it back and forth. The beam caught a
brontosaur in full charge. It stopped, blinded and confused,
and then picked a direction at random and rumbled away.
An eighty-ton shadow thundered by, not three meters to my
right. I started moving back to the campfire, scanning the
darkness, aware I wouldn't get much warning. Halfway there,
another behemoth thundered into the council site. It actually
stepped in the fire, which wasn't to its liking at all. It
squealed, wheeled, and took off more or less toward me. I
watched it coming, figured it would keep moving that way unless
stopped by a major mountain chain, and dodged to my left. The
beast kept going and was swallowed by the night.
I knew enough about b-saurs to know not to expect rational
behavior from them. They were already upset by the
negotiations. Images of tsaurs and feelings of starvation must
have addled their tiny brains considerably. It would have taken
a lot less stimulus than a burning, screaming David Earth to
stampede them. He must have hit them like a stick of dynamite.
And when b-saurs panic, what little sense they possess deserts
them completely. They start off in random directions. There
seems to be an instinct that tends to draw them into a
thundering group, eventually headed in the same direction, but
they don't see well at night, and thus couldn't easily find
each other. The result was seventy or eighty walking mountains
going off in all directions. Very little could stand in their
way.
Certainly not me. I hurried to Callie's side. She was
talking into a pocket communicator, calling for hovercraft as
she stabbed the powerful light beam this way and that. Usually
it was enough to turn the beasts. When it was not, we stepped
very lively indeed.
Before long she picked out a medium-sized cow headed more
or less in our direction, and turned the beam away from it. She
slapped a saur-hook into my hand, and we watched it approach.
Where's the safest place to be in a dinosaur stampede? On
a dinosaur's back. Actually, the best place would have been on
one of the hovercraft, whose lights we could see approaching,
but you take what you can get. We waited for the hind legs to
get past us, dug our hooks into the cow's tail, and swung
ourselves up. A dinosaur doesn't precisely like being hooked,
but her perceptions of pain that far back on her body are dim
and diffused, and this one had other things on her tiny mind.
We scrambled up the tail until we could get a grip on the
fleshy folds of the back. Don't try this at home, by the way.
Callie was an old hand at it, and though I hadn't hooked a saur
in seventy years, the skills were still there. I only wobbled
for a moment, and Callie was there to steady me.
So we rode, and waited. In due time the bronto wore
herself out, rumbled to a stop, and started cropping leaves
from the top of a cycad, probably wondering by now what all the
fuss had been about, if she remembered it at all. We climbed
down, were met by a hover, and got into that.
#
Callie had the "sun" turned on to aid the search. We found
prong-head fairly quickly. He was kneeling in a muddy spot,
shaking uncontrollably. He had survived with nothing but luck
to aid him. I wondered if he ever loved animals quite so much,
or in quite the same way, after that night.
Say what you will about Callie, her worries for the lad
were genuine, and her relief at finding him alive and unhurt
was apparent even to him, in his distracted condition. For that
matter, though David Earth might call her a cold-blooded
killer, she hadn't wished death even on him. She simply
measured human life and animal life on different scales,
something David could never do.
"Let's get him out of here and find David," she said, and
grabbed the young man by his arm. "He's going to need a lot of
medical attention, if he made it." Prong-head resisted, pulling
away from her grasp, remaining on his knees. He pointed down
into the mud. I looked, and then looked away.
"David has returned to the food-chain," he said, and
fainted.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
The next several days were fairly hectic for me. I was
kept so busy I had little time to think or worry about the CC
or entertain thoughts of suicide. The whole idea seemed
completely alien.
Since I work for a print medium I tend not to think in
terms of pictures. My stories are meant to be written,
transmitted to a subscriber-rented scrambler-equipped newspad,
where they will be screened and read by that part of the
population that still reads. Walter employs others to shorten,
simplify, and read aloud his reporters' stories for the illit
channel of the newspad. There are of course all-visual news
services, and now there is direct interface, but so far at
least, D.I. is not something most people do for relaxation and
entertainment. Reading is still the preferred method of
information input for a large minority of Lunarians. It is
slower than D.I., but much quicker and in much greater depth
than pure television news.
But the News Nipple is an electronic medium, and many of
the stories we run come with film clips. Thus did the newspaper
manage to find a government-subsidized, yearly more perilous
niche for itself in the era of television. Pundits keep
predicting the death of the newspad, and year by year it
struggles on, maintained mostly by people who don't want too
much change in their lives.
I tend to forget about the holocam in my left eye. Its
contents are dumped at the same time I enter my story into the
Nipple's editorial computer, and a picture editor usually
fastforwards through it and picks a still shot or a few seconds
of moving images to back up my words. I remember when it was
first installed I worried that those editors would be seeing
things that I'd prefer to be private; after all, the thing
operates all the time, and has a six-hour memory. But the CC
had assured me there was a discrimination program in the main
computer that erased all the irrelevant pictures before a human
ever saw them. (Now it occurred to me to wonder about that. It
had never bothered me that the CC might see the full tapes, but
I'd never thought of him as a snoop before.)
The holocam is a partly mechanical, partly biologic device
about the size of a fingernail clipping that is implanted
inside the eye, way over to one side, out of the way of your
peripheral vision. A semi-silvered mirror is hung in the middle
of the eye, somewhere near the focal point, and reflects part
of the light entering the eye over to the holocam. When you
first have one put in you notice a slight diminution of light
sensitivity in that eye, but the brain is such that it quickly
adjusts and in a few days you never notice it again. It causes
my pupil to look red, and it glows faintly in the dark.
It had been operating when David Earth caught fire,
naturally. I didn't even think of it during subsequent events,
not until David's body had been removed and taken to wherever
Earthists are disposed of. Then I realized I had what might be
the biggest story of my career. And a scoop, as well.
Real death captured by a camera is always guaranteed to
make the front feed of the newspad. The death of a celebrity
would provide fodder for Walter's second-string feature writers
for months to come; anything to have an excuse to run once more
that glorious, horrible image of David's head wreathed in fire,
and the even more horrifying results of being crushed beneath a
stampeding brontosaur.
News footage is exclusive to the paper that filmed it for
a period of twenty-four hours. After that, there is a similar
period when it may be leased for minutes or hours, or sold
outright. After forty-eight hours it all becomes public domain.
A major metropolitan newspaper is geared to exploit these
two critical periods to the utmost. For the first day, when we
could exploit my film exclusively, we made the death of Earth
seem like the biggest story since the marriage of Silvio and
Marina twenty-five years ago, or their divorce one year later,
or the Invasion of the Planet Earth, take your pick. Those are
commonly thought to be the three biggest news stories of all
time, the only real difference in their magnitude being that
two of them were well-covered, and one was not. This story was
nowhere near that big, of course, but you'd never have known it
to read our breathless prose and listen to our frantic
commentators.
I was the center of much of this coverage. There was no
question of sleeping. Since I'm not an on-screen
personality--which means I'm an indifferent speaker, and the
camera does not love me--I spent most of the time sitting
across from our star anchor and answering his questions. Most
of this was fed out live, and often took as much as fifteen
minutes at the top of each hour. For the next fifteen minutes
we showed the reports sent back by the cadres of camerapeople
who descended on Callie's ranch and shot everything from
pictures of the killer dinosaur's bloody foot, to the corpses
of the three b-saurs killed in the stampede, to the still-vivid
imprint of David's body in the mud, to interviews with every
ranch hand who'd ever worked for Callie, even though none of
them had seen anything but the dead body.
I thought Walter was going to explode when he learned that
Callie refused to be interviewed under any circumstances or for
any amount of money. He sent me to the ranch to cajole her. I
went, knowing it would do no good. He threatened to have her
arrested; in his rage, he seemed to believe that refusing to
cooperate with the media-and with him in particular--was
illegal. For her part, Callie made several nasty calls
demanding that we stop using her image, and someone had to read
her the relevant parts of the law that said she couldn't do
anything about it. She rang me up and called me a Judas, among
other things. I don't know what she expected me to do with the
biggest story of my life; sit on it, I guess. I called her a
few things back, just as harsh. I think she was concerned about
her possible liability in the incident, but the main reason was
her loathing for the popular press--something I couldn't
entirely disagree with her on. I have wondered, from time to
time, if that's why I got into this business. Nasty thought,
that.
Anyway, I decided it would be pointless to seek her advice
on the parts of my story I hadn't gotten around to telling her,
for at least a year or so. Make that five years.
The next day was spent farming the story out to competing
rags and vids, but on our terms. The price was high, but
willingly paid. They knew that next time they were as likely to
be on the selling end, and would gouge appropriately. As was
standard practice, I was always included as part of the deal,
so I could mention the Nipple as often and as blatantly as
possible while on live feeds. So I talked myself into a sore
throat sitting beside endless commentators, columnists, and
similar sorts, while the by now dated footage ran yet another
time.
The only person who got as much exposure as I did during
those two days was Eartha Lowe. A movement as radical as the
Earthists will spawn splinter groups like a sow whelps piglets.
It's a law of nature. Eartha was the leader of the largest one,
also called the Earthists, purely to give headaches to poor
newspapermen, I'm convinced. Some of us distinguished them as
Earthist(David) and Earthist(Lowe), others tried the
abomination of Eartha-ists. Most of us simply called them the
Earthists and the Other Earthists, something guaranteed to
provoke a wailing woodnote wild from Eartha, because there was
no need to explain who the "Others" were.
David had died politically intestate. There was no heir
apparent in his organization. Increasingly, people were not
planning for their own deaths, because they simply didn't
expect to die. Perhaps that explains the mordant fascination
with violent images in popular entertainment and the clamor for
more details about real deaths when they occur. We haven't
achieved immortality yet. Maybe we never will. People are
reassured to see death as something that happens to somebody
else, and not often at that.
Eartha Lowe was standing on every soapbox that would
support her not-inconsiderable weight, welcoming the strays
back into the fold. In her version, it was David who had split
away. Who cared that he had taken ninety percent of the flock
with him? We were told that Eartha had always loved David (no
surprise; they had both professed to love every living
creature, though David had loved Eartha more on the level of,
say, a nematode or a virus, not so much as the family dog) and
Eartha had returned his affection in spades. I couldn't follow
all the doctrinal differences. The big one seemed to be
Eartha's contention that any proper Earthist should be in the
female image, to be a mirror of Mother Earth. Or something like
that.
All in all, it was the goldarndest, Barnum-andBaileyest,
rib-stickinest, rough-and-tumblest infernal foofaraw of a media
circus anybody had seen since grandpaw chased the possum down
the road and lost his store teeth, and I was heartily sorry to
have been a part of it.
When the two-day purgatory was over, I collapsed into my
bed for twelve hours. When I woke up, I gave some thought once
more to getting out of the business. Was it a root cause of my
self-destructive tendencies? One would have to think that
hating what I did might contribute to feelings of
worthlessness, and thus to thoughts of ending it all. I tabled
the matter for the moment. I have to admit that though I may
feel disdain for the things we do and the manner in which we do
them, there is a heady thrill to the news business when things
are really happening. Not that exciting things happen all that
often, even in my line of work. Most news is of the
notmuch-happened-today variety, tricked up in various sexy
lies. But when it does happen, it's exhilarating. And there's
an even guiltier pleasure in being where things are happening,
in being the first to know something. About the only other line
of work where you can get as close to the center of things is
politics, and even I draw the line at that. I have some
standards left.
Talking to Callie had been a bust, advice-wise if not
career-wise. But in searching for sources of dissatisfaction
one thing had grown increasingly clear to me. I was wearing my
body like a badly fitted pair of trousers, the kind that bind
you in the crotch. A year as a female, ersatz though the
experience had been, had shown me it was time for a Change.
Past time, probably by several years.
Could that have been the fountain of my discontent? Could
it have been a contributing factor? Doubtful, and possibly.
Even if it had nothing to do with it, it wouldn't hurt to go
ahead and get it done, so I could be comfortable again. Hell,
it was no big deal.
#
When the terribly, terribly fashionable decide the old
genitals are getting to be rather a bore, don't you know, they
phone the chauffeur and have the old bones driven down to
Change Alley.
Normally, when it came time for a Change, I would hie me
to some small neighborhood operation. They are all
board-certified, after all, one just as able as another to do
the necessary nipping and tucking. A confluence of
circumstances this time decided me to visit the street where
the elite meet. One was that my pockets were bulging with the
shekels Walter had showered on me in the form of bonuses for
the Burning Earth story. The other was that I knew Darling
Bobbie when he was just Robert Darling of Crazy Bob's Budget
Barbering and Tattoo Parlor, back when he did sex changes as a
sideline to bring in more money. He'd had a little shop on the
Leystrasse, a determinedly working-class commercial corridor
with a third of the shopfronts boarded up and plastered with
handbills, running through one of the less fashionable
neighborhoods of King City. He'd been sandwiched between a
bordello and a taco stand, and his sign had read "Finast Gender
Alteration On The Leystrasse--E-Z Credit Terms." None of which
was news to anyone: his was the only Change shop in the area,
and you couldn't offer so expensive a service around there
without being prepared to finance. Not that he did a lot of it.
Laborers can't afford frequent sex changes and, as a group, are
not that inclined to question Mother Nature's toss of the dice,
much less flit back and forth from one sex to the other. He did
much better with the tattooing, which was cheap and appealed to
his clientele. He told me he had regulars who had their entire
bodies done every few weeks.
That had been over twenty-five years ago, when I had my
last previous sex change. In that time, Crazy Bob had come up
in the world. He had invented some body frill or other--I can't
even recall what it was now, these things come and go so
quickly they make mayflies seem elderly--that was "discovered"
by slumming socialites. He was elevated overnight into the new
guru of secondary sexual attributes. Fashion writers now
attended his openings and wrote knowingly about the new
season's whimsy. Body styling would probably never be as big or
influential as the rag trade, but a few practitioners to the
hi-thrust set had carved themselves a niche in the world of
fashion.
And Crazy Bob had spent the last ten years trying to make
people forget about the little cock shop next door to the
Jalapen~o Heaven.
Change Alley is a ridiculous name for the place, but it
does branch off of the fivekilometer gulch of glitz known as
Hadleyplatz. For fifty years the Platz, as everyone knew it,
had been the inheritor of such places as Saville Row, Fifth
Avenue, Kimberly Road, and Chimki Prospekt. It was the place to
go if you were looking for solid gold toenail clippers, not so
great for annual white sales. They didn't offer credit on the
Platz, E-Z or otherwise. If the door didn't have your gencode
in its memory banks along with an up-to-the-millisecond
analysis of your pocketbook, it simply didn't open for you.
There were no painted signs to be seen, and almost no
holosigns. Advertising on the Platz ran to small logos in the
bottom corners of plate glass windows, or brilliantly-buffed
gold plaques mounted at eye level.
The Alley branched away from the main promenade at a sharp
angle and dead-ended about a hundred meters later in a cluster
of exclusive restaurants. Along the way were a handful of small
storefronts operated by the handful of very tasteful hucksters
who could persuade their clientele to part with ten times the
going rate for a body make-over so they could have "Body By
So-and-so" engraved on the nail of their pinky finger.
There were holosigns in the Alley shops, showing each
designer's ideas of what the fashionable man or woman was being
these days. The tastemongers back on the main drag liked to say
the Alley was off the Platz, but not of the Platz. Still, it
was all a far cry from the tattoo templates filling the windows
of the Budget Barber.
I wondered if I ought to go in. I wondered if I could go
in. Bob and I had been drinking buddies for a while, but we'd
lost contact after his move. I pressed my hand to the
identiplate, felt the tiny pressure as a probe scraped away a
minuscule amount of dead skin. The machine seemed to hesitate;
perhaps I'd be sent around to the tradesmen's entrance. Then it
swung open. There should have been a flourish of trumpets, I
thought, but that would have been too demonstrative for the
Alley.
"Hildy! Enchanting, enchanting old boy. So good to see
you." He had come out of some concealed back room and covered
the distance to me in three long strides. He pumped my hand
enthusiastically, looking me up and down and adopting a dubious
air. "Good heavens, am I responsible for that? You came just in
time, my friend. Not a moment too soon. But don't worry, I can
fix it, cousin Bobbie will take care of everything. Just put
yourself in my hands."
I suddenly wondered if I wanted to be in his hands. I
thought he was laying it on a trifle thick, but it had been a
while since I'd seen him, and I'm sure he had appearances to
maintain. The gushing, the mincing, all were nods toward
tradition, something practiced by many in his line of work,
just as lawyers tried to develop a sober facade suitable for
the weighty matters they dealt in. Back before Changing, the
fashion world had been dominated by homosexual men. Sexuality
being as complicated as it is, with hundreds of identified
orientations--not to mention ULTRATingle--it was impossible to
know much about anyone else's preferences without talking it
over and spelling it out. Bob, or perhaps I should say Darling,
was hetero-oriented, male born and male leaning, which meant
that, left to his own choice, would be male most of the time
with occasional excursions into a female body, and no matter
his current sex would prefer the company of the opposite.
But his profession almost demanded that he Change four or
five times a year, just as the rag merchants had better wear
their own designs. Today he was male, and didn't look any
different from when I had know him. At least he didn't at
first. When I looked more closely, I saw there were a thousand
subtle alterations, none of them radical enough so his friends
wouldn't recognize him on the street.
"You don't have to take the blame," I told him, as he took
my elbow and guided me toward something he called a "Counseling
Suite." "Maybe you don't remember, but I brought in all the