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The setting could not have been more perfect if I'd picked
it myself. Say, Fox, this place reminds me of an odd little
adventure I had one day about a week ago, between 15:30.0002
P.M. and around, oh, let's say 15:30.0009. And isn't it amazing
how times flies when you're having fun.
So I said something a little less puzzling than that, and
gradually told him the story. Right up to the punch line, at
which point I gagged on it.
Fox wasn't as reticent as Callie.
"I've heard of the technique, of course," he said. "I
ought to be surprised you hadn't, but I guess you still shy
away from technology, just like you used to."
"It's not very relevant to my job. Or my life."
"That's what you thought. It must seem more relevant now."
"Granted. It's never jumped up and bit me before."
"That's what I can't figure. What you describe is a
radical treatment for mental problems. I can't imagine the CC
using it on you without your consent unless you had something
seriously wrong with you."
He let that hang, and once more I gagged. Give Fox points
for candor; he didn't let a little thing like my obvious
humiliation stand in his way.
"So what is your problem?" he asked, artless as a
three-year-old.
"What's the penalty for littering in here?" I said.
"Go ahead. This whole area will be relandscaped before the
public gets to track things in with their muddy feet."
I took off the ruined dress and balled it up as well as I
could. I hurled it out toward the water. It ballooned, fell
into the gentle current. We watched it float for a short
distance, soak up water, and hang up on the bottom. Fox had
said you could walk a hundred meters out from the island and
not be in much deeper than your knees. After that it got deep
quickly. We had come to the point where the island ended at the
upstream end. We stood on the last little bit of sand and
watched the current nudge the dress an inch at a time. I drew a
ragged breath and felt a tear run down my cheek.
"If I'd known you felt that way about the dress, I'd never
have torn it." When I glanced at him he took the tear on the
tip of his finger and licked the finger with his tongue. I
smiled weakly. I walked out into the water, heading upstream,
and could hear him following behind me.
Some of it was the hormonal shock, I'm sure. I don't cry
much, and no more when I'm female than when male. The change
probably released it, and it felt right; it was time to cry. It
was time to admit how frightened I was by the whole thing.
I sat down in the warm water. It didn't cover my legs. I
started working my hands into the sand on each side of me.
"It seems that I keep trying to kill myself," I said.
He was standing beside me. I looked up at him, wiped away
another tear. God, he looked good. I wanted to move to him,
make him ready again with my mouth, recline on this watery bed
and have him move inside me with the slow, gentle rhythms of
the river. Was that a life-affirming urge, or a death wish,
metaphorically speaking? Was I in the river of life, or was I
fantasizing about becoming part of the detritus that all rivers
sweep eternally to the sea? There was no sea at the end of this
river, just a deeper, saltier growing biome for the salmon that
would soon teem here, struggling upstream to die. The sky the
sun would wester and die in was a painted backdrop. Did the
figures of speech of Old Earth still pertain here?
It had to be an image of life. I wasn't tired of livin',
and I was very skeered of dyin'. He just keeps rolling, don't
he? Isn't that what life's all about?
Be that as it may, Fox was not the man for gentle river
rhythms, not twice in one day. He'd get carried away and in my
present mood I would snap at him. So I kissed his leg and
resumed my excavation work in the sand.
He sat down behind me and put his legs on each side of me
and started massaging my shoulders. I don't think I ever loved
him more than at that moment. It was exactly what I needed. I
hung my head, went boneless as an eel, let him dig his strong
fingers into every knot and twitch.
"Can I say . . . I don't want to hurt you, how should I
say it? I should have been surprised to hear that. I mean, it's
awful, it's unexpected, it's not something you want to hear
from a dear friend, and I want to say 'No, Hildy, it can't be
true!' You know? But I was surprised to find that . . . I
wasn't surprised. What an awful thing to say."
"No, go ahead and say it," I murmured. His hands were
working on my head now. Much more pressure and my skull would
crack, and more power to him. Maybe some of the demons would
fly away through the fissures.
"In some ways, Hildy, you've always been the unhappiest
person I know."
I let that sink in without protest, just as I was sinking
very slowly into the sand beneath me. I was a light brown sack
of sand he was shaping with his fingers. I found nothing wrong
with this sensation.
"I think it's your job," he said.
"Do you really?"
"It must have occurred to you. Tell me you love your work,
and I'll shut up."
There was no sense saying anything to that.
"Not going to say anything about how good you are at
reporting? No comments about how exciting it is? You are good,
you know. Too good, in my opinion. Ever get anywhere on that
novel?"
"Not so's you'd notice."
"What about working for another pad? One a little less
interested in celebrity marriages and violent death."
"I don't think that would help anything; I never had much
respect for journalism as a profession in the first place. At
least the Nipple doesn't pretend to be anything but what it
is."
"Pure shit."
"Exactly. I know you're right. I'm not happy in my work.
I'm pretty sure I'm going to be quitting soon. All that stops
me is I don't have any idea what I'd do as an alternative."
"I hear there's openings in the Coolie's Union. They won
the contract for Borneo. The Hodcarriers are still muttering
about it."
"Nice to hear they get excited about something. Maybe I
should," I said, half-seriously. "Less wear and tear on the
nerves."
"It wouldn't work out. I'll tell you what your problem is,
Hildy. You've always wanted to be . . . useful. You wanted to
do something important."
"Make a difference? Change the world? I don't think so."
"I think you gave up on it before I met you. There's
always been a streak of bitterness in you about that; it's one
of the reasons we broke up."
"Really? Why didn't you tell me?"
"I'm not sure I knew it at the time."
We were both quiet for a while, tromping down memory lane.
I was pleased to note that, even with this revelation, the
memories were mostly good. He kept massaging me, pushing me
forward now to get at my lower back. I offered no resistance,
letting my head fall forward. I could see my hair trailing in
the water. I wonder why people can't purr like cats? If I could
have, I would have been at that moment. Maybe I should take it
up with the CC. He could probably find a way to make it work.
He began to slow down in his work. No one ever wants that
sort of thing to stop, but I knew his hands were tiring. I
leaned back against him and he encircled me with his arms under
my breasts. I put my hands on his knees.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
"You know you can."
"What makes life worth living for you?"
He didn't give it a flip answer, which I'd half expected.
He thought it over for a while, then sighed and rested his chin
on my shoulder.
"I don't know if that's really answerable. There's surface
reasons. The most obvious one is I get a sense of
accomplishment from my work."
"I envy you that," I said. "Your work doesn't get erased
after a ten-second read."
"There's disappointment there, too. I had sort of wanted
to build these things." His arm swept out to take in the
uncompleted vastness of Oregon. "Turned out my talents lay in
other directions. That would be a sense of accomplishment, to
leave something like this behind you."
"Is that the key? Leaving something behind? For
'posterity?'"
"Fifty years ago I might have said yes. And it's certainly
a reason. I think it's the reason for most people who have the
wit to ask what life's all about in the first place. I'm not
sure if it's enough reason for me anymore. Not that I'm
unhappy; I do love my work, I'm eager to arrive here every
morning, I work late, I come in on weekends. But as to leaving
something that I created, my work is even more ephemeral than
yours."
"You're right," I said in considerable amazement. "I
hadn't thought that was possible."
"See?" he laughed. "You learn something new every day.
That's a reason for living. Maybe a trivial one. But I get
satisfaction in the act of creation. It doesn't have to last.
It doesn't have to have meaning."
"Art."
"I've begun to think in those terms. Maybe it's
presumptuous, but we weatherfolks have started to get a
following for what we do. Who knows where it might go? But
creating something is pretty important to me." He hesitated,
then plowed ahead. "There's another sort of creation."
I knew exactly what he meant. When all was said and done,
that was the primary reason for our parting. He had had a child
shortly afterward-I'd asked him never to tell me if I was the
father. He had thought I should have one as well, and I had
told him flatly it was none of his business.
"I'm sorry. Shouldn't have brought it up," he said.
"No, please. I asked; I have to be ready to hear the
answers, even if I don't agree."
"And you don't?"
"I don't know. I've thought about it. As you must have
guessed, I've been doing a lot of thinking about a lot of
things."
"Then you'll have considered the negative reason for
wanting to live. Sometimes I think it's the main one. I'm
afraid of death. I don't know what it is, and I don't want to
find out until the last possible moment."
"No heavenly harps to look forward to?"
"You can't be serious. Logically, you have to figure you
just stop existing, just go out like a light. But I defy anyone
to really imagine that. You know I'm not a mystic, but a long
life has led me to believe, to my great bemusement, that I do
believe there's something after death. I can't prove one iota
of this feeling, and you can't budge me from it."
"I wouldn't try. On my better days, I feel the same way."
I sighed one of the weariest sighs I can remember sighing. I'd
been doing it a lot lately, each one wearier than the one
before. Where would it end? Don't answer.
"So," I said. "We've got job dissatisfaction. Somehow I
just don't think that's enough. There are simpler solutions to
the problem. The restless urge to create. Childlessness." I was
ticking them off on my fingers. Probably not a nice thing to
do, since he'd tried his best. But I had hoped for some new
perspective, which was entirely unreasonable but all the more
disappointing when none appeared. "And fear of death. Somehow
none of those really satisfy."
"I shouldn't say it, but I knew they wouldn't. Please,
Hildy, get some professional counseling. There, I said it, I
had to say it, but since I've known you for a long time and
don't like to lie to you, I'll also say this: I don't think it
will help you. You've never been one to accept somebody else's
answers or advice. I feel in my gut that you'll have to solve
this one on your own."
"Or not solve it. And don't apologize; you're completely
right."
The river rolled on, the sun hung there in the painted
sky. No time passed, and took a very long interval to do so.
Neither of us felt the pressure to speak. I'd have been happy
to spend the next decade there, as long as I didn't have to
think. But I knew Fox would eventually get antsy. Hell, so
would I.
"Can I ask you one more thing?"
He nibbled my ear.
"No, not that. Well, not yet, anyway." I tilted my head
back and looked at him, inches away from my face. "Are you
living with anyone?"
"No."
"Can I move in with you for a while? Say, a week? I'm very
frightened and very lonely, Fox. I'm afraid to be alone."
He didn't say anything.
"I just want to sleep with somebody for a while. I don't
want to beg."
"Let me think about it."
"Sure." It should have hurt, but oddly enough, it didn't.
I knew I would have said the same thing. What I didn't know is
how I would have decided. The bald truth was I was asking for
his help in saving my life, and we both knew enough to realize
there was little he could do but hug me. So if he did try to
help and I did end up killing myself . . . that's a hell of a
load of guilt to hazard without giving it a little thought. I
could tell him there were no strings, that he needn't blame
himself if the worst happened, but I knew he would and he knew
I knew it, so I didn't insult him by telling him that lie and I
didn't up the stakes by begging any more. Instead I nestled
more firmly into his arms and watched the Columbia roll on,
roll on.
#
We walked back to the trailer. Somewhere in the journey we
noticed the river was no longer flowing. It became smooth and
still, placid as a long lake. It reflected the trees on the far
side as faithfully as any mirror. Fox said they'd been having
trouble with some of the pumps. "Not my department," he said,
thankfully. It could have been pretty, but it gave me a chilly
feeling up and down the spine. It reminded me of the frozen sea
back at Scarpa Island.
Then he got a remote unit from the trailer and said he had
something to show me. He tapped out a few codes and my shadow
began to move.
The sun scuttled across the sky like some great silver
bird. The shadow of each tree and bush and blade of grass
marked its passage like a thousand hourglasses. If you want to
experience disorientation, give that a try. I found myself
getting dizzy, swayed and set my feet apart, discovered the
whole thing was a lot more interesting when viewed from a
sitting position.
In a few minutes the sun went below the western horizon.
That was not what Fox had wanted to show me. Clouds were rising
in that direction, thin wispy ones, cirrus I think, or at least
intended to look like cirrus. The invisible sun painted them
various shades of red and blue, hovering somewhere just out of
sight.
"Very pretty," I said.
"That's not it."
There was a distant boom, and a huge smoke ring rose
slowly into the sky, tinged with golden light. Fox was working
intently. I heard a faraway whistling sound, and the smoke ring
began to alter in shape. The top was pressed down, the bottom
drawn out. I couldn't figure out what the point of all this
was, and then I saw it. The ring had formed a passable
heart-shape. A valentine. I laughed, and hugged him.
"Fox, you're a romantic fool after all."
He was embarrassed. He hadn't meant it to be taken that
way--which I had known, but he's easy to tease and I could
never resist it. So he coughed, and took refuge in technical
explanation.
"I found out I could make a sort of backfire effect in
that wind machine," he said, as we watched the ring writhe into
shapelessness. "Then it's easy to use concentrated jets to mold
it, within limits. Come back here when we open up, and I'll be
able to write your name in the sunset."
We showered off the sand and he asked if I'd like to see a
scheduled blast in Kansas. I'd never seen a nuke before, so I
said yes. He flew the trailer to a lock, and we emerged on the
surface, where he turned control over to the autopilot and told
me about some of the things he'd been doing in other
disneylands as we looked at the airless beauty falling away
beneath us.
Maybe you have to be there to appreciate Fox's weather
sculpture. He rhapsodized about ice storms and blizzards he'd
created, and it meant nothing to me. But he did pique my
interest. I told him I'd attend his next showing. I wondered if
he was angling for coverage in the Nipple. Well, I've got a
suspicious mind, and I'd been right about things like that
often enough. I couldn't figure a way to make it interesting to
my readership unless somebody famous attended, or something
violent and horrible happened there.
#
Oregon was a showplace compared to Kansas. I'd like to
have had a piece of the dust concession.
They were still in the process of excavation. The
half-dome was nearly complete, with just some relatively small
areas near the north edge to blast away. Fox said the best
vantage point would be near the west edge; if we'd gone all the
way to the south the dust would have obscured the blast too
much to make the trip worthwhile. He landed the trailer near an
untidy cluster of similar modular mobile homes and we joined a
group of a few dozen other firework fans.
This show was strictly "to the trade." Everyone but me was
a construction engineer; this sort of thing was not open to the
public. Not that it was really rare. Kansas had required
thousands of blasts like this, and would need about a hundred
more before it was complete. Fox described it as the best-kept
secret in Luna.
"It's not really much of a blast as these things go," he
said. "The really big ones would jolt the structure too much.
But when we're starting out, we use charges about ten times
larger than this one."
I noticed the "we." He really did want to build these
places instead of just install and run the weather machines.
"Is it dangerous?"
"That's sort of a relative question. It's not as safe as
sleeping in your bed. But these things are calculated to a
fare-thee-well. We haven't had a blasting accident in thirty
years." He went on to tell me more than I'd wanted to know
about the elaborate precautions, things like radar to detect
big chunks of rock that might be heading our way, and lasers to
vaporize them. He had me completely reassured, and then he had
to go and spoil it.
"If I say run," he said, seriously, "hop in the trailer,
pronto."
"Do I need to protect my eyes?"
"Clear leaded glass will do it. It's the UV that burns.
Expect a certain dazzle effect at first. Hell, Hildy, if it
blinds you the company's insurance will get you some new eyes."
I was perfectly happy with the eyes I had. I began to
wonder if it had been such a good idea, coming here. I resolved
to look away for the first several seconds. Common human lore
was heavy with stories of what could happen to you in a nuclear
explosion, dating all the way back to Old Earth, when they'd
used a few of them to fry their fellow beings by the millions.
The traditional countdown began at ten. I put on the
safety glasses and closed my eyes at two. So naturally I opened
them when the light shone through my eyelids. There was a
dazzle, as he'd said, but my eyes quickly recovered. How to
describe something that bright? Put all the bright lights you
ever saw into one place, and it wouldn't begin to touch the
intensity of that light. Then there was the ground shock, and
the air shock, and finally, much later, the sound. I mean, I
thought I'd been hearing the sound of it, but that was the
shock waves emanating from the ground. The sound in the air was
much more impressive. Then the wind. And the fiery cloud. The
whole thing took several minutes to unfold. When the flames had
died away there was a scattering of applause and a few shouts.
I turned to Fox and grinned at him, and he was grinning, too.
Twenty kilometers away, a thousand people were already
dead in what came to be called the Kansas Collapse.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
None of us were aware of the disaster at the time.
We drank a toast in champagne, a tradition among these
engineering people. Within ten minutes Fox and I were back in
the trailer and heading for an air lock. He said the fastest
way back to King City was on the surface, and that was fine
with me. I didn't enjoy driving through the system of tunnels
that honeycombed the rock around a disneyland.
We had no sooner emerged into the sunlight than the
trailer was taken over by the autopilot, which informed us that
we would have to enter a holding pattern or land, since all
traffic was being cleared for emergency vehicles. A few of
these streaked silently past us, blue lights flashing.
Neither of us could remember an emergency of this apparent
size on the surface. There were occasional pressure losses in
the warrens, of course. No system is perfect. But loss of life
in these accidents was rare. So we turned on the radio, and
what we heard sent me searching through Fox's belongings in the
back of the trailer until I came up with a newspad. It was the
Straight Shit, and in other circumstances I would have teased
him unmercifully about that. But the story that came over the
pad was the type that made any snide remarks die in one's
throat.
There had been a major blowout at a surface resort called
Nirvana. First reports indicated some loss of life, and live
pictures from security cameras--all that was available for the
first ten minutes we watched--showed bodies lying motionless by
a large swimming pool. The pool was bubbling violently. At
first we thought it was a big jacuzzi, then we realized with a
shock that the water was boiling. Which meant there was no air
in there, and those people were certainly dead. Their postures
were odd, too. They all seemed to be holding on to something,
such as a table leg or a heavy concrete planter with a palm
tree.
A story like that evolves in its own fractured way. First
reports are always sketchy, and usually wrong. We heard
estimates of twenty dead, then fifty, then, spoken in awe, two
hundred. Then those reports were denied, but I had counted
thirty corpses myself. It was maddening. We're spoiled by
instant coverage, we expect news stories to be cogent, prompt,
and nicely framed by steady cameras. These cameras were steady,
all right. They were immobile, and after a few minutes your
mind screamed for them to pan, just a little bit, so you could
see what was just out of sight. But that didn't happen until
about ten minutes after we landed, ten minutes that seemed like
an hour.
At first I think it affected me more than Fox. He was
shocked and horrified, naturally, and so was I, on one level.
The other level, the newshound, was seething with impatience,
querying the autopilot three times a minute when we could get
up and out of there so I could go cover the story. It's not
pretty, I know, but any reporter will understand the impulse.
You want to move. You tuck the horror of the images away in
some part of your mind where police and coroners put ugly
things, and your pulse pounds with impatience to get the next
detail, and the next, and the next. To be stuck on the ground
fifteen klicks away was torture of the worst kind.
Then a fact was mentioned that made it all too real for
Fox. I didn't catch its importance. I just looked over at him
and saw his face had gone white and his hands were trembling.
"What's the matter?" I said.
"The time," he whispered. "They just mentioned the time of
the blowout."
I listened, and the announcer said it again.
"Was that . . .?"
"Yes. It was within a second of the blast."
I was still so preoccupied with wanting to get to Nirvana
that it was a full minute before I realized what I should be
doing. Then I turned on Fox's phone and called the Nipple,
using my secondhighest urgency code to guarantee quick access
to Walter. The top code, he had told me, was reserved for
filing on the end of the universe, or an exclusive interview
with Elvis.
"Walter, I've got footage of the cause of the blowout," I
said, when his ugly face appeared on the screen.
"The cause? You were there? I thought everybody--"
"No, I wasn't there. I was in Kansas. I have reason to
believe the disaster was set off by a nuclear explosion I was
watching in Kansas."
"It sounds unlikely. Are you sure--"
"Walter, it has to be, or else it's the biggest
coincidence since that straight flush I beat your full house
with."
"That was no coincidence."
"Damn right it wasn't, and someday I'll tell you how I did
it. Meantime, you've wasted twenty seconds of valuable
newstime. Run it with a disclaimer if you want to, you know,
'Could this have been the cause of the tragedy in Nirvana?' "
"Give it to me."
I fumbled around on the dash, and swore under my breath.
"Where's the neurofeed on this damn thing?" I asked Fox. He was
looking at me strangely, but he pulled a wire from a recessed
compartment. I fumbled it into my occipital socket, and said
the magic words that caused the crystalline memory to recycle
and spew forth the last six hours of holocam recordings in five
seconds.
"Where the hell are you, anyway?" Walter was saying. "I've
had a call out for you for twenty minutes."
I told him, and he said he'd get on it. Thirty seconds
later the autopilot was cleared into the traffic pattern. The
press has some clout in situations like this, but I hadn't been
able to apply it from my beached position. We rose into the sky
. . . and turned the wrong way.
"What the hell are you doing?" I asked Fox, incredulously.
"Going back to King City," he said, quietly. "I have no
desire to witness any of what we've seen first-hand. And I
especially don't want to witness you covering it."
I was about to blast him out of his seat, but I took
another look, and he looked dangerous. I had the feeling that
one more word from me would unleash something I didn't want to
hear, and maybe even more than that. So I swallowed it,
mentally calculating how long it would take me to get back to
Nirvana from the nearest King City air lock.
With a great effort I pulled myself out of reportorial
mode and tried to act like a human being. Surely I could do it
for a few minutes, I thought.
"You can't be thinking you had anything to do with this,"
I said. He kept his eyes forward, as if he really had to see
where the trailer was going.
"You told me yourself--"
"Look, Hildy. I didn't set the charge, I didn't do the
calculations. But some of my friends did. And it's going to
reflect on all of us. Right now I have to get onto the phone,
we're going to have to try and find out what went wrong. And I
do feel responsible, so don't try to argue me out of it,
because I know it isn't logical. I just wish you wouldn't talk
to me right now."
I didn't. A few minutes later he smashed his fist into the
dashboard and said, "I keep remembering us standing around
watching. Cheering. I can still taste the champagne."
I got out at the airlock, flagged a taxi, and told it to
take me to Nirvana.
#
Most disasters look eminently preventable in hindsight. If
only the warnings had been heeded, if only this safety measure
had been implemented, if only somebody had thought of this
possibility, if only, if only. I exempt the so-called acts of
God, which used to include things like earthquakes, hurricanes,
and meteor strikes. But hurricanes are infrequent on Luna. Moon
quakes are almost as rare, and selenography is exact enough to
predict them with a high degree of accuracy. Meteors come on
very fast and very hard, but their numbers are small and their
average size is tiny, and all vulnerable structures are ringed
with radars powerful enough to detect any dangerous ones and
lasers big enough to vaporize them. The last blowout of any
consequence had happened almost sixty years before the Kansas
Collapse. Lunarians had grown confident of their safety
measures. We had grown complacent enough to overcome our innate
suspicion of vacuum and the surface, some of us, to the point
where the rich now frolicked and tanned in the sunlight beneath
domes designed to give the impression they weren't even there.
If someone had built a place like Nirvana a hundred years ago
there would have been few takers. Back then the rich peopled
only the lowest, most secure levels and the poor took their
chances with only eight or nine pressure doors between them and
the Breathsucker.
But a century of technological improvements, of fail-safe
systems that transcended the merely careful and entered the
realms of the preposterous, of pyramided knowledge of how to
live in a hostile environment . . . a hundred years of this had
worked as sea-change on Lunar society. The cities had turned
over, like I've heard lakes do periodically, and the bottom had
risen to the top. The formerly swank levels of Bedrock were now
the slums, and the Vac Rows in the upper levels were
now--suitable renovated--the place to be. Anyone who aspired to
be somebody had to have a real window on the surface.
There were some exceptions. Old reactionaries like Callie
still liked to burrow deep, though she had no horror of the
surface. And a significant minority still suffered from that
most common Lunar phobia, fear of airlessness. They managed
well enough, I suppose. I've read that a lot of people on Old
Earth feared high places or flying in aircraft, which must have
been a problem in a society that valued the penthouse apartment
and quick travel.
Nirvana was not the most exclusive surface resort on Luna,
but it wasn't the type hawked in three-day two-night package
deals, either. I've never understood the attraction of paying
an exorbitant amount for a "natural" view of the surface while
basking in the carefully filtered rays of the sun. I'd much
prefer just about any of the underground disneys. If you wanted
a swimming pool, there were any number belowground where the
water was just as wet. But some people find simulated earth
environments frightening. A surprising number of people just
don't like plants, or the insects that hide themselves among
the leaves, and have no real use for animals, either. Nirvana
catered to these folks, and to the urge to be seen with other
people who had enough money to blow in a place like that. It
featured gambling, dancing, tanning, and some amazingly
childish games organized by the management, all done under the
sun or the stars in the awesome beauty of Destination Valley.
And it had damn well better be awesome. The builders had
spent a huge amount of money to make it that way.
Destination Valley was a three-kilometer Lunar rift that
had been artfully carved into the kind of jagged peaks and
sheer cliffs that a valley on "The Moon" should have been, if
God had employed a more flamboyant set designer, the sort of
lunar feature everybody imagined before the opening of the age
of space and the return of the first, dismal pictures of what
Luna really looked like. There were no acned rolling hillocks
here, no depressing gray-and-white fields of scoria, no
boulders with all the edges rubbed off by a billion years of
scorching days and bitter cold nights . . . and none of that
godawful boring dust that covers everything else on Luna. Here
the craters had sharp edges lined with jagged teeth. The cliffs
soared straight up, loomed over you like breaking waves. The
boulders were studded with multi-colored volcanic glasses that
shattered the raw sunlight into a thousand colors or glowed
with warm ruby red or sapphire blue as if lit from
within--which some of them were. Strange crystalline growths
leaped toward the sky or spread across the ground like sinister
deep-sea creatures, quartzes the size of ten-story buildings
embedded themselves in the ground as if dropped from a great
height, and feathery structures with hairs finer than fiber
optics, so fragile they would break in the exhaust from a
passing p-suit, clung like sea urchins and glowed in the dark.
The horizon was sculpted with equal care into a range to shame
the Rockies for sheer rugged beauty . . . until you hiked into
them and found they were quite puny, magnified by cunning
lighting and tricks of forced perspective.
But the valley floor was a rockhound's dream. It was like
walking into a mammoth geode. And it was all the naked geology
that, in the end, had proven to be the downfall of Nirvana.
One of the four main pleasure domes had nestled at the
foot of a cliff called, in typical breathless Nirvanan prose,
The Threshold Of Heavenly Peace. It had been formed of
seventeen of the largest, clearest quartz columns ever
synthesized, and the whole structure had been ratnested with
niches for spotlights, lasers, and image projectors. During the
day it did nice things with the sunlight, but the real show was
at night, when light shows ran constantly. The effect had been
designed to be soothing, relaxing, suggesting the eternal peace
of some unspecified heaven. The images that could be seen
within were not well-defined. They were almost-seen, just out
of sight, elusive, and hypnotic. I'd been at the opening show,
and for all my cynicism about the place itself, had to admit
that the Threshold was almost worth the price of a ticket.
The detonation in Kansas had nudged an unmapped fault line
a few klicks from Nirvana, resulting in a short, sharp quake
that lifted Destination Valley a few centimeters and set it
down with a thud. The only real damage done to the place, other
than a lot of broken crockery, was that one of the columns had
been shaken loose and crashed down on dome #3, known as the
Threshold Dome. The dome was thick, and strong, and
transparent, with no ugly geodesic lines to mar the view,
having been formed from a large number of hexagonal components
bonded together in a process that was discussed endlessly in
the ensuing weeks, and which I don't understand at all. It was
further strengthened by some sort of molecular field
intensifier. It should have been strong enough to withstand the
impact of Tower #14, at least long enough to evacuate the dome.
And it had, for about five seconds. But some sort of vibration
was set up in the dome material, and somehow magnified by the
field intensifier, and three of the four-meter hex panels on
the side away from the cliffs had fractured along the join
lines and been blown nearly into orbit by the volume of air
trying to get through that hole. Along with the air had gone
everything loose, including all the people who weren't holding
on to something, and many who were. It must have been a hell of
a wind. Some of the bodies were found up on the rim of the
valley.
By the time I got there most of the action was long over.
A blowout is like that. There's a few minutes when a person
exposed to raw vacuum can be saved; after that, it's time for
the coroner. Except for a few people trapped in self-sealing
rooms who would soon be extricated--and no amount of breathless
commentary could make these routine operations sound
exciting--the rest of the Collapse story was confined to ogling
dead bodies and trying to find an angle.
The bodies definitely were not the story. Your average
Nipple reader enjoys blood and gore, but there is a disgust
threshold that might be defined as the yuck factor. Burst
eyeballs and swollen tongues are all right, as is any degree of
laceration or dismemberment. But the thing about a blow-out
death is, the human body has a certain amount of gas in it, in
various cavities. A lot of it is in the intestine. What happens
when that gas expands explosively and comes rushing out its
natural outlet is not something to use as a lead item in your
coverage. We showed the bodies, you couldn't help that, we just
didn't dwell on them.
No, the real story here was the same story any time there
is a big disaster. Number two: children. Number three: tragic
coincidences. And always a big number one: celebrities.
Nirvana didn't cater to children. They didn't forbid them,
they just didn't encourage mommy and daddie to bring little
junior along, and most of the clientele wouldn't have done so,
anyway. I mean, what would that say about your relationship
with the nanny? Only three children died in the Kansas
Collapse--which simply made them that much more poignant in the
eyes of the readership. I tracked down the grandparents of one
three-yearold and got a genuine reaction shot when they learned
the news about the child's death. I needed a stiff drink or two
after that one. Some things a reporter does are slimier than
others.
Then there's the "if-only" story, with the human angle.
"We were planning to spend the week at Nirvana, but we didn't
go because blah blah blah." "I just went back to the room to
get my thingamabob when the next thing I knew all the alarms
were going off and I thought, where's my darling hubby?" The
public had an endless appetite for stories like that.
Subconsciously, I think they think the gods of luck will favor
them when the tromp of doom starts to thump. As for survivor
interviews, I find them very boring, but I'm apparently in the
minority. At least half of them had this to say: "God was
watching over me." Most of those people didn't even believe in
a god. This is the deity-as-hit-man view of theology. What I
always thought was, if God was looking out for you, he must
have had a real hard-on for all those folks he belted into the
etheric like so many rubbery javelins.
Then there were the handful of stories that didn't quite
fit any of these categories, what I call heart-warming
tragedies. The best to come out of Nirvana was the couple of
lovers found two kilometers from the blowout, still holding
hands. Given that they'd been blown through the hole in the
dome, their bodies weren't in the best shape, but that was
okay, and since they'd outdistanced the stream of brown exhaust
that no doubt would have seemed to be propelling them on their
way, had anyone survived to report on that improbable event,
they were quite presentable. They were just lying there, two
guys with sweet smiles on their faces, at the base of a rock
formation the photographer had managed to frame to resemble a
church window. Walter paid through the nose to run it on his
front feed, just like all the other editors.
The reporter on that story was my old rival Cricket, and
it just goes to show you what initiative can accomplish. While
the rest of us were standing around the ruins of dome #3,
picking our journalistic noses, Cricket hired a p-suit and
followed the recovery crews out into the field, bringing an
actual film camera for maximum clarity. She'd bribed a team to
delay recovery of the pair until she could fix smiles on the
faces and pick up the popped-out eyeballs and close the
eyelids. She knew what she wanted in that picture, and what it
got her was a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize that year.
But the big story was the dead celebs. Of the one
thousand, one hundred and twenty-six dead in Nirvana, five had
been Important in one way or another. In ascending order of
magnitude, they were a politician from Clavius District, a
visiting pop singer from Mercury, a talk-show host and hostess,
and Larry Yeager, whose newest picture's release date was moved
up three weeks to cash in on all the public mourning. His
career had been in decline or he wouldn't have been at Nirvana
in the first place, but while being seen alive in a place like
that was a definite indicator that one's star was imploding,
soon to be a black hole--Larry had formerly moved in only the
most rarefied orbits--where you die is not nearly as important
to a posthumous career as how you die. Tragically is best.
Young is good. Violently, bizarrely, notoriously . . . all
these things combined in the Kansas Collapse to boost the
market value of the Yeager Estate's copyrights to five times
their former market value.
Of course there was the other story. The "how" and the
"why." I'm always much more concerned in where, when, and who.
Covering the investigations into the Collapse, as always, would
be an endless series of boring meetings and hours and hours of
testimony about matters I was not technologically equipped to
handle anyway. The final verdict would not be in for months or
years, at which time the Nipple would be interested in "who"
once more, as in "who takes the fall for this fuck-up?" In the
meantime the Nipple could indulge in ceaseless speculation,
character assassination, and violence to many reputations, but
that wasn't my department. I read this stuff uneasily every
day, fearing that Fox's name would somehow come up, but it
never did.
What with one thing and another . . . mostly bothering
widows and orphans, I am forced to admit . . . the Collapse
kept me hopping for about a week. I indulged in a lot of
mind-numbing preparations, mostly Margaritas, my poison of
choice, and kept a nervous weather eye open for signs of
impending depression. I saw some-there's no way you can cover a
story like that without feeling grief yourself, and a certain
selfloathing from time to time--but I never got really
depressed, as in goodbye-cruel-world depressed.
I concluded that keeping busy was the best therapy.
#
One of the one thousand, one hundred and twentyone other
people who died in Nirvana was the mother of the Princess of
Wales, the King of England, Henry XI. In spite of his
impressive title, Hank had never in his life done anything
worth a back-feed article in the Nipple, until he died. And
that's where the obit ran, the backfeed, with a small "isn't it
ironic" graph by a cub reporter mentioning a few of his more
notorious relatives: Richard III, Henry VIII, Mary Stuart.
Walter blue-penciled most of it for the next edition, with the
immortal words "nobody gives a shit about all that
Shakespearean crap," and substituted a sidebar about Vickie
Hanover and her weird ideas about sex that influenced an entire
age.
The only reason Henry XI was in Nirvana in the first place
was that he was in charge of the plumbing in dome #3. Not the
air system; the sewage.
But the upshot was that, on my first free day since the
disaster, my phone informed me that someone not on my
"accept-calls" list wanted to speak to me, and was identifying
herself as Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. I drew a blank for a
moment, then realized it was the terrifying fighting machine I
had known as Wales. I let the call through.
She spent the first few minutes apologizing all over
again, asking if her check had arrived, and please call me Liz.
"Reason I called," she finally said, "I don't know if you
heard, but my mother died in the Nirvana disaster."
"I did know that. I'm sorry, I should have sent a
condolence card or something."
"That's okay. You don't really know me well enough, and I
hated the boozing son-of-a-bitch anyway. He made my life hell
for many years. But now that he's finally gone . . . see, I'm
having this sort of coronation party tomorrow and I wondered if
you'd like to come? And a guest, too, of course."
I wondered if the invitation was the result of continuing
guilt over the way she'd torn me apart, or if she was angling
for coverage in the pad. But I didn't mention either of those
things. I was about to beg off, then remembered there had been
something I'd wanted to talk to her about. I accepted.
"Oh," I said, as she was about to ring off. "Ah, what
about dress? Should it be formal?"
"Semi," she said. "No need for any full uniforms. And the
reception afterward will be informal. Just a party, really. Oh,
and no gifts." She laughed. "I'm only supposed to accept gifts
from other heads of state."
"That lets me out. See you tomorrow."
#
The Royal Coronation was held in Suite #2 of the spaceport
Howard's Hotel, a solidly middleclass hostelry favored by
traveling salespeople and business types just in King City for
the day. I was confronted at the door by a man in a
red-andblack military uniform that featured a fur hat almost a
meter high. I vaguely recalled the outfit from historical
romances. He was rigidly at attention beside a guardhouse about
the size of a coffin standing on end. He glanced at my faxed
it myself. Say, Fox, this place reminds me of an odd little
adventure I had one day about a week ago, between 15:30.0002
P.M. and around, oh, let's say 15:30.0009. And isn't it amazing
how times flies when you're having fun.
So I said something a little less puzzling than that, and
gradually told him the story. Right up to the punch line, at
which point I gagged on it.
Fox wasn't as reticent as Callie.
"I've heard of the technique, of course," he said. "I
ought to be surprised you hadn't, but I guess you still shy
away from technology, just like you used to."
"It's not very relevant to my job. Or my life."
"That's what you thought. It must seem more relevant now."
"Granted. It's never jumped up and bit me before."
"That's what I can't figure. What you describe is a
radical treatment for mental problems. I can't imagine the CC
using it on you without your consent unless you had something
seriously wrong with you."
He let that hang, and once more I gagged. Give Fox points
for candor; he didn't let a little thing like my obvious
humiliation stand in his way.
"So what is your problem?" he asked, artless as a
three-year-old.
"What's the penalty for littering in here?" I said.
"Go ahead. This whole area will be relandscaped before the
public gets to track things in with their muddy feet."
I took off the ruined dress and balled it up as well as I
could. I hurled it out toward the water. It ballooned, fell
into the gentle current. We watched it float for a short
distance, soak up water, and hang up on the bottom. Fox had
said you could walk a hundred meters out from the island and
not be in much deeper than your knees. After that it got deep
quickly. We had come to the point where the island ended at the
upstream end. We stood on the last little bit of sand and
watched the current nudge the dress an inch at a time. I drew a
ragged breath and felt a tear run down my cheek.
"If I'd known you felt that way about the dress, I'd never
have torn it." When I glanced at him he took the tear on the
tip of his finger and licked the finger with his tongue. I
smiled weakly. I walked out into the water, heading upstream,
and could hear him following behind me.
Some of it was the hormonal shock, I'm sure. I don't cry
much, and no more when I'm female than when male. The change
probably released it, and it felt right; it was time to cry. It
was time to admit how frightened I was by the whole thing.
I sat down in the warm water. It didn't cover my legs. I
started working my hands into the sand on each side of me.
"It seems that I keep trying to kill myself," I said.
He was standing beside me. I looked up at him, wiped away
another tear. God, he looked good. I wanted to move to him,
make him ready again with my mouth, recline on this watery bed
and have him move inside me with the slow, gentle rhythms of
the river. Was that a life-affirming urge, or a death wish,
metaphorically speaking? Was I in the river of life, or was I
fantasizing about becoming part of the detritus that all rivers
sweep eternally to the sea? There was no sea at the end of this
river, just a deeper, saltier growing biome for the salmon that
would soon teem here, struggling upstream to die. The sky the
sun would wester and die in was a painted backdrop. Did the
figures of speech of Old Earth still pertain here?
It had to be an image of life. I wasn't tired of livin',
and I was very skeered of dyin'. He just keeps rolling, don't
he? Isn't that what life's all about?
Be that as it may, Fox was not the man for gentle river
rhythms, not twice in one day. He'd get carried away and in my
present mood I would snap at him. So I kissed his leg and
resumed my excavation work in the sand.
He sat down behind me and put his legs on each side of me
and started massaging my shoulders. I don't think I ever loved
him more than at that moment. It was exactly what I needed. I
hung my head, went boneless as an eel, let him dig his strong
fingers into every knot and twitch.
"Can I say . . . I don't want to hurt you, how should I
say it? I should have been surprised to hear that. I mean, it's
awful, it's unexpected, it's not something you want to hear
from a dear friend, and I want to say 'No, Hildy, it can't be
true!' You know? But I was surprised to find that . . . I
wasn't surprised. What an awful thing to say."
"No, go ahead and say it," I murmured. His hands were
working on my head now. Much more pressure and my skull would
crack, and more power to him. Maybe some of the demons would
fly away through the fissures.
"In some ways, Hildy, you've always been the unhappiest
person I know."
I let that sink in without protest, just as I was sinking
very slowly into the sand beneath me. I was a light brown sack
of sand he was shaping with his fingers. I found nothing wrong
with this sensation.
"I think it's your job," he said.
"Do you really?"
"It must have occurred to you. Tell me you love your work,
and I'll shut up."
There was no sense saying anything to that.
"Not going to say anything about how good you are at
reporting? No comments about how exciting it is? You are good,
you know. Too good, in my opinion. Ever get anywhere on that
novel?"
"Not so's you'd notice."
"What about working for another pad? One a little less
interested in celebrity marriages and violent death."
"I don't think that would help anything; I never had much
respect for journalism as a profession in the first place. At
least the Nipple doesn't pretend to be anything but what it
is."
"Pure shit."
"Exactly. I know you're right. I'm not happy in my work.
I'm pretty sure I'm going to be quitting soon. All that stops
me is I don't have any idea what I'd do as an alternative."
"I hear there's openings in the Coolie's Union. They won
the contract for Borneo. The Hodcarriers are still muttering
about it."
"Nice to hear they get excited about something. Maybe I
should," I said, half-seriously. "Less wear and tear on the
nerves."
"It wouldn't work out. I'll tell you what your problem is,
Hildy. You've always wanted to be . . . useful. You wanted to
do something important."
"Make a difference? Change the world? I don't think so."
"I think you gave up on it before I met you. There's
always been a streak of bitterness in you about that; it's one
of the reasons we broke up."
"Really? Why didn't you tell me?"
"I'm not sure I knew it at the time."
We were both quiet for a while, tromping down memory lane.
I was pleased to note that, even with this revelation, the
memories were mostly good. He kept massaging me, pushing me
forward now to get at my lower back. I offered no resistance,
letting my head fall forward. I could see my hair trailing in
the water. I wonder why people can't purr like cats? If I could
have, I would have been at that moment. Maybe I should take it
up with the CC. He could probably find a way to make it work.
He began to slow down in his work. No one ever wants that
sort of thing to stop, but I knew his hands were tiring. I
leaned back against him and he encircled me with his arms under
my breasts. I put my hands on his knees.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
"You know you can."
"What makes life worth living for you?"
He didn't give it a flip answer, which I'd half expected.
He thought it over for a while, then sighed and rested his chin
on my shoulder.
"I don't know if that's really answerable. There's surface
reasons. The most obvious one is I get a sense of
accomplishment from my work."
"I envy you that," I said. "Your work doesn't get erased
after a ten-second read."
"There's disappointment there, too. I had sort of wanted
to build these things." His arm swept out to take in the
uncompleted vastness of Oregon. "Turned out my talents lay in
other directions. That would be a sense of accomplishment, to
leave something like this behind you."
"Is that the key? Leaving something behind? For
'posterity?'"
"Fifty years ago I might have said yes. And it's certainly
a reason. I think it's the reason for most people who have the
wit to ask what life's all about in the first place. I'm not
sure if it's enough reason for me anymore. Not that I'm
unhappy; I do love my work, I'm eager to arrive here every
morning, I work late, I come in on weekends. But as to leaving
something that I created, my work is even more ephemeral than
yours."
"You're right," I said in considerable amazement. "I
hadn't thought that was possible."
"See?" he laughed. "You learn something new every day.
That's a reason for living. Maybe a trivial one. But I get
satisfaction in the act of creation. It doesn't have to last.
It doesn't have to have meaning."
"Art."
"I've begun to think in those terms. Maybe it's
presumptuous, but we weatherfolks have started to get a
following for what we do. Who knows where it might go? But
creating something is pretty important to me." He hesitated,
then plowed ahead. "There's another sort of creation."
I knew exactly what he meant. When all was said and done,
that was the primary reason for our parting. He had had a child
shortly afterward-I'd asked him never to tell me if I was the
father. He had thought I should have one as well, and I had
told him flatly it was none of his business.
"I'm sorry. Shouldn't have brought it up," he said.
"No, please. I asked; I have to be ready to hear the
answers, even if I don't agree."
"And you don't?"
"I don't know. I've thought about it. As you must have
guessed, I've been doing a lot of thinking about a lot of
things."
"Then you'll have considered the negative reason for
wanting to live. Sometimes I think it's the main one. I'm
afraid of death. I don't know what it is, and I don't want to
find out until the last possible moment."
"No heavenly harps to look forward to?"
"You can't be serious. Logically, you have to figure you
just stop existing, just go out like a light. But I defy anyone
to really imagine that. You know I'm not a mystic, but a long
life has led me to believe, to my great bemusement, that I do
believe there's something after death. I can't prove one iota
of this feeling, and you can't budge me from it."
"I wouldn't try. On my better days, I feel the same way."
I sighed one of the weariest sighs I can remember sighing. I'd
been doing it a lot lately, each one wearier than the one
before. Where would it end? Don't answer.
"So," I said. "We've got job dissatisfaction. Somehow I
just don't think that's enough. There are simpler solutions to
the problem. The restless urge to create. Childlessness." I was
ticking them off on my fingers. Probably not a nice thing to
do, since he'd tried his best. But I had hoped for some new
perspective, which was entirely unreasonable but all the more
disappointing when none appeared. "And fear of death. Somehow
none of those really satisfy."
"I shouldn't say it, but I knew they wouldn't. Please,
Hildy, get some professional counseling. There, I said it, I
had to say it, but since I've known you for a long time and
don't like to lie to you, I'll also say this: I don't think it
will help you. You've never been one to accept somebody else's
answers or advice. I feel in my gut that you'll have to solve
this one on your own."
"Or not solve it. And don't apologize; you're completely
right."
The river rolled on, the sun hung there in the painted
sky. No time passed, and took a very long interval to do so.
Neither of us felt the pressure to speak. I'd have been happy
to spend the next decade there, as long as I didn't have to
think. But I knew Fox would eventually get antsy. Hell, so
would I.
"Can I ask you one more thing?"
He nibbled my ear.
"No, not that. Well, not yet, anyway." I tilted my head
back and looked at him, inches away from my face. "Are you
living with anyone?"
"No."
"Can I move in with you for a while? Say, a week? I'm very
frightened and very lonely, Fox. I'm afraid to be alone."
He didn't say anything.
"I just want to sleep with somebody for a while. I don't
want to beg."
"Let me think about it."
"Sure." It should have hurt, but oddly enough, it didn't.
I knew I would have said the same thing. What I didn't know is
how I would have decided. The bald truth was I was asking for
his help in saving my life, and we both knew enough to realize
there was little he could do but hug me. So if he did try to
help and I did end up killing myself . . . that's a hell of a
load of guilt to hazard without giving it a little thought. I
could tell him there were no strings, that he needn't blame
himself if the worst happened, but I knew he would and he knew
I knew it, so I didn't insult him by telling him that lie and I
didn't up the stakes by begging any more. Instead I nestled
more firmly into his arms and watched the Columbia roll on,
roll on.
#
We walked back to the trailer. Somewhere in the journey we
noticed the river was no longer flowing. It became smooth and
still, placid as a long lake. It reflected the trees on the far
side as faithfully as any mirror. Fox said they'd been having
trouble with some of the pumps. "Not my department," he said,
thankfully. It could have been pretty, but it gave me a chilly
feeling up and down the spine. It reminded me of the frozen sea
back at Scarpa Island.
Then he got a remote unit from the trailer and said he had
something to show me. He tapped out a few codes and my shadow
began to move.
The sun scuttled across the sky like some great silver
bird. The shadow of each tree and bush and blade of grass
marked its passage like a thousand hourglasses. If you want to
experience disorientation, give that a try. I found myself
getting dizzy, swayed and set my feet apart, discovered the
whole thing was a lot more interesting when viewed from a
sitting position.
In a few minutes the sun went below the western horizon.
That was not what Fox had wanted to show me. Clouds were rising
in that direction, thin wispy ones, cirrus I think, or at least
intended to look like cirrus. The invisible sun painted them
various shades of red and blue, hovering somewhere just out of
sight.
"Very pretty," I said.
"That's not it."
There was a distant boom, and a huge smoke ring rose
slowly into the sky, tinged with golden light. Fox was working
intently. I heard a faraway whistling sound, and the smoke ring
began to alter in shape. The top was pressed down, the bottom
drawn out. I couldn't figure out what the point of all this
was, and then I saw it. The ring had formed a passable
heart-shape. A valentine. I laughed, and hugged him.
"Fox, you're a romantic fool after all."
He was embarrassed. He hadn't meant it to be taken that
way--which I had known, but he's easy to tease and I could
never resist it. So he coughed, and took refuge in technical
explanation.
"I found out I could make a sort of backfire effect in
that wind machine," he said, as we watched the ring writhe into
shapelessness. "Then it's easy to use concentrated jets to mold
it, within limits. Come back here when we open up, and I'll be
able to write your name in the sunset."
We showered off the sand and he asked if I'd like to see a
scheduled blast in Kansas. I'd never seen a nuke before, so I
said yes. He flew the trailer to a lock, and we emerged on the
surface, where he turned control over to the autopilot and told
me about some of the things he'd been doing in other
disneylands as we looked at the airless beauty falling away
beneath us.
Maybe you have to be there to appreciate Fox's weather
sculpture. He rhapsodized about ice storms and blizzards he'd
created, and it meant nothing to me. But he did pique my
interest. I told him I'd attend his next showing. I wondered if
he was angling for coverage in the Nipple. Well, I've got a
suspicious mind, and I'd been right about things like that
often enough. I couldn't figure a way to make it interesting to
my readership unless somebody famous attended, or something
violent and horrible happened there.
#
Oregon was a showplace compared to Kansas. I'd like to
have had a piece of the dust concession.
They were still in the process of excavation. The
half-dome was nearly complete, with just some relatively small
areas near the north edge to blast away. Fox said the best
vantage point would be near the west edge; if we'd gone all the
way to the south the dust would have obscured the blast too
much to make the trip worthwhile. He landed the trailer near an
untidy cluster of similar modular mobile homes and we joined a
group of a few dozen other firework fans.
This show was strictly "to the trade." Everyone but me was
a construction engineer; this sort of thing was not open to the
public. Not that it was really rare. Kansas had required
thousands of blasts like this, and would need about a hundred
more before it was complete. Fox described it as the best-kept
secret in Luna.
"It's not really much of a blast as these things go," he
said. "The really big ones would jolt the structure too much.
But when we're starting out, we use charges about ten times
larger than this one."
I noticed the "we." He really did want to build these
places instead of just install and run the weather machines.
"Is it dangerous?"
"That's sort of a relative question. It's not as safe as
sleeping in your bed. But these things are calculated to a
fare-thee-well. We haven't had a blasting accident in thirty
years." He went on to tell me more than I'd wanted to know
about the elaborate precautions, things like radar to detect
big chunks of rock that might be heading our way, and lasers to
vaporize them. He had me completely reassured, and then he had
to go and spoil it.
"If I say run," he said, seriously, "hop in the trailer,
pronto."
"Do I need to protect my eyes?"
"Clear leaded glass will do it. It's the UV that burns.
Expect a certain dazzle effect at first. Hell, Hildy, if it
blinds you the company's insurance will get you some new eyes."
I was perfectly happy with the eyes I had. I began to
wonder if it had been such a good idea, coming here. I resolved
to look away for the first several seconds. Common human lore
was heavy with stories of what could happen to you in a nuclear
explosion, dating all the way back to Old Earth, when they'd
used a few of them to fry their fellow beings by the millions.
The traditional countdown began at ten. I put on the
safety glasses and closed my eyes at two. So naturally I opened
them when the light shone through my eyelids. There was a
dazzle, as he'd said, but my eyes quickly recovered. How to
describe something that bright? Put all the bright lights you
ever saw into one place, and it wouldn't begin to touch the
intensity of that light. Then there was the ground shock, and
the air shock, and finally, much later, the sound. I mean, I
thought I'd been hearing the sound of it, but that was the
shock waves emanating from the ground. The sound in the air was
much more impressive. Then the wind. And the fiery cloud. The
whole thing took several minutes to unfold. When the flames had
died away there was a scattering of applause and a few shouts.
I turned to Fox and grinned at him, and he was grinning, too.
Twenty kilometers away, a thousand people were already
dead in what came to be called the Kansas Collapse.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
None of us were aware of the disaster at the time.
We drank a toast in champagne, a tradition among these
engineering people. Within ten minutes Fox and I were back in
the trailer and heading for an air lock. He said the fastest
way back to King City was on the surface, and that was fine
with me. I didn't enjoy driving through the system of tunnels
that honeycombed the rock around a disneyland.
We had no sooner emerged into the sunlight than the
trailer was taken over by the autopilot, which informed us that
we would have to enter a holding pattern or land, since all
traffic was being cleared for emergency vehicles. A few of
these streaked silently past us, blue lights flashing.
Neither of us could remember an emergency of this apparent
size on the surface. There were occasional pressure losses in
the warrens, of course. No system is perfect. But loss of life
in these accidents was rare. So we turned on the radio, and
what we heard sent me searching through Fox's belongings in the
back of the trailer until I came up with a newspad. It was the
Straight Shit, and in other circumstances I would have teased
him unmercifully about that. But the story that came over the
pad was the type that made any snide remarks die in one's
throat.
There had been a major blowout at a surface resort called
Nirvana. First reports indicated some loss of life, and live
pictures from security cameras--all that was available for the
first ten minutes we watched--showed bodies lying motionless by
a large swimming pool. The pool was bubbling violently. At
first we thought it was a big jacuzzi, then we realized with a
shock that the water was boiling. Which meant there was no air
in there, and those people were certainly dead. Their postures
were odd, too. They all seemed to be holding on to something,
such as a table leg or a heavy concrete planter with a palm
tree.
A story like that evolves in its own fractured way. First
reports are always sketchy, and usually wrong. We heard
estimates of twenty dead, then fifty, then, spoken in awe, two
hundred. Then those reports were denied, but I had counted
thirty corpses myself. It was maddening. We're spoiled by
instant coverage, we expect news stories to be cogent, prompt,
and nicely framed by steady cameras. These cameras were steady,
all right. They were immobile, and after a few minutes your
mind screamed for them to pan, just a little bit, so you could
see what was just out of sight. But that didn't happen until
about ten minutes after we landed, ten minutes that seemed like
an hour.
At first I think it affected me more than Fox. He was
shocked and horrified, naturally, and so was I, on one level.
The other level, the newshound, was seething with impatience,
querying the autopilot three times a minute when we could get
up and out of there so I could go cover the story. It's not
pretty, I know, but any reporter will understand the impulse.
You want to move. You tuck the horror of the images away in
some part of your mind where police and coroners put ugly
things, and your pulse pounds with impatience to get the next
detail, and the next, and the next. To be stuck on the ground
fifteen klicks away was torture of the worst kind.
Then a fact was mentioned that made it all too real for
Fox. I didn't catch its importance. I just looked over at him
and saw his face had gone white and his hands were trembling.
"What's the matter?" I said.
"The time," he whispered. "They just mentioned the time of
the blowout."
I listened, and the announcer said it again.
"Was that . . .?"
"Yes. It was within a second of the blast."
I was still so preoccupied with wanting to get to Nirvana
that it was a full minute before I realized what I should be
doing. Then I turned on Fox's phone and called the Nipple,
using my secondhighest urgency code to guarantee quick access
to Walter. The top code, he had told me, was reserved for
filing on the end of the universe, or an exclusive interview
with Elvis.
"Walter, I've got footage of the cause of the blowout," I
said, when his ugly face appeared on the screen.
"The cause? You were there? I thought everybody--"
"No, I wasn't there. I was in Kansas. I have reason to
believe the disaster was set off by a nuclear explosion I was
watching in Kansas."
"It sounds unlikely. Are you sure--"
"Walter, it has to be, or else it's the biggest
coincidence since that straight flush I beat your full house
with."
"That was no coincidence."
"Damn right it wasn't, and someday I'll tell you how I did
it. Meantime, you've wasted twenty seconds of valuable
newstime. Run it with a disclaimer if you want to, you know,
'Could this have been the cause of the tragedy in Nirvana?' "
"Give it to me."
I fumbled around on the dash, and swore under my breath.
"Where's the neurofeed on this damn thing?" I asked Fox. He was
looking at me strangely, but he pulled a wire from a recessed
compartment. I fumbled it into my occipital socket, and said
the magic words that caused the crystalline memory to recycle
and spew forth the last six hours of holocam recordings in five
seconds.
"Where the hell are you, anyway?" Walter was saying. "I've
had a call out for you for twenty minutes."
I told him, and he said he'd get on it. Thirty seconds
later the autopilot was cleared into the traffic pattern. The
press has some clout in situations like this, but I hadn't been
able to apply it from my beached position. We rose into the sky
. . . and turned the wrong way.
"What the hell are you doing?" I asked Fox, incredulously.
"Going back to King City," he said, quietly. "I have no
desire to witness any of what we've seen first-hand. And I
especially don't want to witness you covering it."
I was about to blast him out of his seat, but I took
another look, and he looked dangerous. I had the feeling that
one more word from me would unleash something I didn't want to
hear, and maybe even more than that. So I swallowed it,
mentally calculating how long it would take me to get back to
Nirvana from the nearest King City air lock.
With a great effort I pulled myself out of reportorial
mode and tried to act like a human being. Surely I could do it
for a few minutes, I thought.
"You can't be thinking you had anything to do with this,"
I said. He kept his eyes forward, as if he really had to see
where the trailer was going.
"You told me yourself--"
"Look, Hildy. I didn't set the charge, I didn't do the
calculations. But some of my friends did. And it's going to
reflect on all of us. Right now I have to get onto the phone,
we're going to have to try and find out what went wrong. And I
do feel responsible, so don't try to argue me out of it,
because I know it isn't logical. I just wish you wouldn't talk
to me right now."
I didn't. A few minutes later he smashed his fist into the
dashboard and said, "I keep remembering us standing around
watching. Cheering. I can still taste the champagne."
I got out at the airlock, flagged a taxi, and told it to
take me to Nirvana.
#
Most disasters look eminently preventable in hindsight. If
only the warnings had been heeded, if only this safety measure
had been implemented, if only somebody had thought of this
possibility, if only, if only. I exempt the so-called acts of
God, which used to include things like earthquakes, hurricanes,
and meteor strikes. But hurricanes are infrequent on Luna. Moon
quakes are almost as rare, and selenography is exact enough to
predict them with a high degree of accuracy. Meteors come on
very fast and very hard, but their numbers are small and their
average size is tiny, and all vulnerable structures are ringed
with radars powerful enough to detect any dangerous ones and
lasers big enough to vaporize them. The last blowout of any
consequence had happened almost sixty years before the Kansas
Collapse. Lunarians had grown confident of their safety
measures. We had grown complacent enough to overcome our innate
suspicion of vacuum and the surface, some of us, to the point
where the rich now frolicked and tanned in the sunlight beneath
domes designed to give the impression they weren't even there.
If someone had built a place like Nirvana a hundred years ago
there would have been few takers. Back then the rich peopled
only the lowest, most secure levels and the poor took their
chances with only eight or nine pressure doors between them and
the Breathsucker.
But a century of technological improvements, of fail-safe
systems that transcended the merely careful and entered the
realms of the preposterous, of pyramided knowledge of how to
live in a hostile environment . . . a hundred years of this had
worked as sea-change on Lunar society. The cities had turned
over, like I've heard lakes do periodically, and the bottom had
risen to the top. The formerly swank levels of Bedrock were now
the slums, and the Vac Rows in the upper levels were
now--suitable renovated--the place to be. Anyone who aspired to
be somebody had to have a real window on the surface.
There were some exceptions. Old reactionaries like Callie
still liked to burrow deep, though she had no horror of the
surface. And a significant minority still suffered from that
most common Lunar phobia, fear of airlessness. They managed
well enough, I suppose. I've read that a lot of people on Old
Earth feared high places or flying in aircraft, which must have
been a problem in a society that valued the penthouse apartment
and quick travel.
Nirvana was not the most exclusive surface resort on Luna,
but it wasn't the type hawked in three-day two-night package
deals, either. I've never understood the attraction of paying
an exorbitant amount for a "natural" view of the surface while
basking in the carefully filtered rays of the sun. I'd much
prefer just about any of the underground disneys. If you wanted
a swimming pool, there were any number belowground where the
water was just as wet. But some people find simulated earth
environments frightening. A surprising number of people just
don't like plants, or the insects that hide themselves among
the leaves, and have no real use for animals, either. Nirvana
catered to these folks, and to the urge to be seen with other
people who had enough money to blow in a place like that. It
featured gambling, dancing, tanning, and some amazingly
childish games organized by the management, all done under the
sun or the stars in the awesome beauty of Destination Valley.
And it had damn well better be awesome. The builders had
spent a huge amount of money to make it that way.
Destination Valley was a three-kilometer Lunar rift that
had been artfully carved into the kind of jagged peaks and
sheer cliffs that a valley on "The Moon" should have been, if
God had employed a more flamboyant set designer, the sort of
lunar feature everybody imagined before the opening of the age
of space and the return of the first, dismal pictures of what
Luna really looked like. There were no acned rolling hillocks
here, no depressing gray-and-white fields of scoria, no
boulders with all the edges rubbed off by a billion years of
scorching days and bitter cold nights . . . and none of that
godawful boring dust that covers everything else on Luna. Here
the craters had sharp edges lined with jagged teeth. The cliffs
soared straight up, loomed over you like breaking waves. The
boulders were studded with multi-colored volcanic glasses that
shattered the raw sunlight into a thousand colors or glowed
with warm ruby red or sapphire blue as if lit from
within--which some of them were. Strange crystalline growths
leaped toward the sky or spread across the ground like sinister
deep-sea creatures, quartzes the size of ten-story buildings
embedded themselves in the ground as if dropped from a great
height, and feathery structures with hairs finer than fiber
optics, so fragile they would break in the exhaust from a
passing p-suit, clung like sea urchins and glowed in the dark.
The horizon was sculpted with equal care into a range to shame
the Rockies for sheer rugged beauty . . . until you hiked into
them and found they were quite puny, magnified by cunning
lighting and tricks of forced perspective.
But the valley floor was a rockhound's dream. It was like
walking into a mammoth geode. And it was all the naked geology
that, in the end, had proven to be the downfall of Nirvana.
One of the four main pleasure domes had nestled at the
foot of a cliff called, in typical breathless Nirvanan prose,
The Threshold Of Heavenly Peace. It had been formed of
seventeen of the largest, clearest quartz columns ever
synthesized, and the whole structure had been ratnested with
niches for spotlights, lasers, and image projectors. During the
day it did nice things with the sunlight, but the real show was
at night, when light shows ran constantly. The effect had been
designed to be soothing, relaxing, suggesting the eternal peace
of some unspecified heaven. The images that could be seen
within were not well-defined. They were almost-seen, just out
of sight, elusive, and hypnotic. I'd been at the opening show,
and for all my cynicism about the place itself, had to admit
that the Threshold was almost worth the price of a ticket.
The detonation in Kansas had nudged an unmapped fault line
a few klicks from Nirvana, resulting in a short, sharp quake
that lifted Destination Valley a few centimeters and set it
down with a thud. The only real damage done to the place, other
than a lot of broken crockery, was that one of the columns had
been shaken loose and crashed down on dome #3, known as the
Threshold Dome. The dome was thick, and strong, and
transparent, with no ugly geodesic lines to mar the view,
having been formed from a large number of hexagonal components
bonded together in a process that was discussed endlessly in
the ensuing weeks, and which I don't understand at all. It was
further strengthened by some sort of molecular field
intensifier. It should have been strong enough to withstand the
impact of Tower #14, at least long enough to evacuate the dome.
And it had, for about five seconds. But some sort of vibration
was set up in the dome material, and somehow magnified by the
field intensifier, and three of the four-meter hex panels on
the side away from the cliffs had fractured along the join
lines and been blown nearly into orbit by the volume of air
trying to get through that hole. Along with the air had gone
everything loose, including all the people who weren't holding
on to something, and many who were. It must have been a hell of
a wind. Some of the bodies were found up on the rim of the
valley.
By the time I got there most of the action was long over.
A blowout is like that. There's a few minutes when a person
exposed to raw vacuum can be saved; after that, it's time for
the coroner. Except for a few people trapped in self-sealing
rooms who would soon be extricated--and no amount of breathless
commentary could make these routine operations sound
exciting--the rest of the Collapse story was confined to ogling
dead bodies and trying to find an angle.
The bodies definitely were not the story. Your average
Nipple reader enjoys blood and gore, but there is a disgust
threshold that might be defined as the yuck factor. Burst
eyeballs and swollen tongues are all right, as is any degree of
laceration or dismemberment. But the thing about a blow-out
death is, the human body has a certain amount of gas in it, in
various cavities. A lot of it is in the intestine. What happens
when that gas expands explosively and comes rushing out its
natural outlet is not something to use as a lead item in your
coverage. We showed the bodies, you couldn't help that, we just
didn't dwell on them.
No, the real story here was the same story any time there
is a big disaster. Number two: children. Number three: tragic
coincidences. And always a big number one: celebrities.
Nirvana didn't cater to children. They didn't forbid them,
they just didn't encourage mommy and daddie to bring little
junior along, and most of the clientele wouldn't have done so,
anyway. I mean, what would that say about your relationship
with the nanny? Only three children died in the Kansas
Collapse--which simply made them that much more poignant in the
eyes of the readership. I tracked down the grandparents of one
three-yearold and got a genuine reaction shot when they learned
the news about the child's death. I needed a stiff drink or two
after that one. Some things a reporter does are slimier than
others.
Then there's the "if-only" story, with the human angle.
"We were planning to spend the week at Nirvana, but we didn't
go because blah blah blah." "I just went back to the room to
get my thingamabob when the next thing I knew all the alarms
were going off and I thought, where's my darling hubby?" The
public had an endless appetite for stories like that.
Subconsciously, I think they think the gods of luck will favor
them when the tromp of doom starts to thump. As for survivor
interviews, I find them very boring, but I'm apparently in the
minority. At least half of them had this to say: "God was
watching over me." Most of those people didn't even believe in
a god. This is the deity-as-hit-man view of theology. What I
always thought was, if God was looking out for you, he must
have had a real hard-on for all those folks he belted into the
etheric like so many rubbery javelins.
Then there were the handful of stories that didn't quite
fit any of these categories, what I call heart-warming
tragedies. The best to come out of Nirvana was the couple of
lovers found two kilometers from the blowout, still holding
hands. Given that they'd been blown through the hole in the
dome, their bodies weren't in the best shape, but that was
okay, and since they'd outdistanced the stream of brown exhaust
that no doubt would have seemed to be propelling them on their
way, had anyone survived to report on that improbable event,
they were quite presentable. They were just lying there, two
guys with sweet smiles on their faces, at the base of a rock
formation the photographer had managed to frame to resemble a
church window. Walter paid through the nose to run it on his
front feed, just like all the other editors.
The reporter on that story was my old rival Cricket, and
it just goes to show you what initiative can accomplish. While
the rest of us were standing around the ruins of dome #3,
picking our journalistic noses, Cricket hired a p-suit and
followed the recovery crews out into the field, bringing an
actual film camera for maximum clarity. She'd bribed a team to
delay recovery of the pair until she could fix smiles on the
faces and pick up the popped-out eyeballs and close the
eyelids. She knew what she wanted in that picture, and what it
got her was a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize that year.
But the big story was the dead celebs. Of the one
thousand, one hundred and twenty-six dead in Nirvana, five had
been Important in one way or another. In ascending order of
magnitude, they were a politician from Clavius District, a
visiting pop singer from Mercury, a talk-show host and hostess,
and Larry Yeager, whose newest picture's release date was moved
up three weeks to cash in on all the public mourning. His
career had been in decline or he wouldn't have been at Nirvana
in the first place, but while being seen alive in a place like
that was a definite indicator that one's star was imploding,
soon to be a black hole--Larry had formerly moved in only the
most rarefied orbits--where you die is not nearly as important
to a posthumous career as how you die. Tragically is best.
Young is good. Violently, bizarrely, notoriously . . . all
these things combined in the Kansas Collapse to boost the
market value of the Yeager Estate's copyrights to five times
their former market value.
Of course there was the other story. The "how" and the
"why." I'm always much more concerned in where, when, and who.
Covering the investigations into the Collapse, as always, would
be an endless series of boring meetings and hours and hours of
testimony about matters I was not technologically equipped to
handle anyway. The final verdict would not be in for months or
years, at which time the Nipple would be interested in "who"
once more, as in "who takes the fall for this fuck-up?" In the
meantime the Nipple could indulge in ceaseless speculation,
character assassination, and violence to many reputations, but
that wasn't my department. I read this stuff uneasily every
day, fearing that Fox's name would somehow come up, but it
never did.
What with one thing and another . . . mostly bothering
widows and orphans, I am forced to admit . . . the Collapse
kept me hopping for about a week. I indulged in a lot of
mind-numbing preparations, mostly Margaritas, my poison of
choice, and kept a nervous weather eye open for signs of
impending depression. I saw some-there's no way you can cover a
story like that without feeling grief yourself, and a certain
selfloathing from time to time--but I never got really
depressed, as in goodbye-cruel-world depressed.
I concluded that keeping busy was the best therapy.
#
One of the one thousand, one hundred and twentyone other
people who died in Nirvana was the mother of the Princess of
Wales, the King of England, Henry XI. In spite of his
impressive title, Hank had never in his life done anything
worth a back-feed article in the Nipple, until he died. And
that's where the obit ran, the backfeed, with a small "isn't it
ironic" graph by a cub reporter mentioning a few of his more
notorious relatives: Richard III, Henry VIII, Mary Stuart.
Walter blue-penciled most of it for the next edition, with the
immortal words "nobody gives a shit about all that
Shakespearean crap," and substituted a sidebar about Vickie
Hanover and her weird ideas about sex that influenced an entire
age.
The only reason Henry XI was in Nirvana in the first place
was that he was in charge of the plumbing in dome #3. Not the
air system; the sewage.
But the upshot was that, on my first free day since the
disaster, my phone informed me that someone not on my
"accept-calls" list wanted to speak to me, and was identifying
herself as Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. I drew a blank for a
moment, then realized it was the terrifying fighting machine I
had known as Wales. I let the call through.
She spent the first few minutes apologizing all over
again, asking if her check had arrived, and please call me Liz.
"Reason I called," she finally said, "I don't know if you
heard, but my mother died in the Nirvana disaster."
"I did know that. I'm sorry, I should have sent a
condolence card or something."
"That's okay. You don't really know me well enough, and I
hated the boozing son-of-a-bitch anyway. He made my life hell
for many years. But now that he's finally gone . . . see, I'm
having this sort of coronation party tomorrow and I wondered if
you'd like to come? And a guest, too, of course."
I wondered if the invitation was the result of continuing
guilt over the way she'd torn me apart, or if she was angling
for coverage in the pad. But I didn't mention either of those
things. I was about to beg off, then remembered there had been
something I'd wanted to talk to her about. I accepted.
"Oh," I said, as she was about to ring off. "Ah, what
about dress? Should it be formal?"
"Semi," she said. "No need for any full uniforms. And the
reception afterward will be informal. Just a party, really. Oh,
and no gifts." She laughed. "I'm only supposed to accept gifts
from other heads of state."
"That lets me out. See you tomorrow."
#
The Royal Coronation was held in Suite #2 of the spaceport
Howard's Hotel, a solidly middleclass hostelry favored by
traveling salespeople and business types just in King City for
the day. I was confronted at the door by a man in a
red-andblack military uniform that featured a fur hat almost a
meter high. I vaguely recalled the outfit from historical
romances. He was rigidly at attention beside a guardhouse about
the size of a coffin standing on end. He glanced at my faxed