Страница:
---------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright (C) 1991 by John Varley.
For the personal use of those who have
purchased the ESF 1993 Award anthology only.
---------------------------------------------------------------
STEEL BEACH
by John Varley
"In five years, the penis will be obsolete," said the
salesman.
He paused to let this planet-shattering information sink
into our amazed brains. Personally, I didn't know how many more
wonders I could absorb before lunch.
"With the right promotional campaign," he went on,
breathlessly, "it might take as little as two years.
He might even have been right. Stranger things have
happened in my lifetime. But I decided to hold off on calling
my broker with frantic orders to sell all my jock-strap stock.
The press conference was being held in a large auditorium
belonging to United Bioengineers. It could seat about a
thousand; it presently held about a fifth that number, most of
us huddled together in the front rows.
The UniBio salesman was non-nondescript as a game-show
host. He had one of those voices, too. A Generic person. One of
these days they'll standardize every profession by face and
body type. Like uniforms.
He went on:
"Sex as we know it is awkward, inflexible, unimaginative.
By the time you're forty, you've done everything you possibly
could with our present, 'natural' sexual system. In fact, if
you're even moderately active, you've done everything a dozen
times. It's become boring. And if it's boring at forty, what
will it be like at eighty, or a hundred and forty? Have you
ever thought about that? About what you'll be doing for a sex
life when you're eighty? Do you really want to be repeating the
same old acts?"
"Whatever I'm doing, it won't be with him," Cricket
whispered in my ear.
"How about with me?" I whispered back. "Right after the
show."
"How about after I'm eighty?" She gave me a sharp little
jab in the ribs, but she was smiling. Which is more than I
could say for the hulk sitting in front of us. He worked for
Perfect Body, weighed about two hundred kilos--none of it
fat--and was glaring over the slope of one massive trapezius,
flexing the muscles in his eyebrows. I wouldn't have believed
he could even turn his head, much less look over his shoulder.
You could hear the gristle popping.
We took the hint and shut up.
"At United Bioengineers," the pitch went on, "we have no
doubt that, given twenty or thirty million years, Mother Nature
would have remedied some of these drawbacks. In fact," and here
he gave a smile that managed to be sly and aw-shucks at the
same time, "we wonder if the grand old lady might have settled
on this very System . . . that's how good we think it is.
"And how good is that? I hear you saying. There have been
a lot of improvements since the days of Christine Jorgensen.
What makes this one so special?"
"Christine who?" Cricket whispered, typing rapidly with
the fingers of her right hand on her left forearm.
"Jorgensen. First male-to-female sex change, not counting
opera singers. What are they teaching you in journalism school
these days?"
"Get the spin right, and the factoids will follow. Hell,
Hildy, I didn't realize you dated the lady."
"I've done worse since. If she hadn't kept trying to lead
on the dance floor . . . "
This time an arm--it had to be an arm, it grew out of his
shoulder, though I could have put both my legs into one of his
sleeves--hooked itself over the back of the chair in front of
me, and I was treated to the whole elephantine display, from
the crew-cut yellow hair to the jaw you could have used to plow
the south forty, to the neck wider than Cricket's hips. I held
up my hands placatingly, pantomimed locking up my lips and
throwing away the key. His brow beetled even more-- god help me
if he thought I was making fun of him-- then he turned back
around. I was left wondering where he got the tiny barbells he
must have used to get those forehead muscles properly pumped
up.
In a word, I was bored.
I'd seen the Sexual Millennium announced before. As
recently as the previous March, in fact, and quite regularly
before that. It was like end-of-the-world stories, or perpetual
motion machines. A journalist figured to encounter them every
few weeks as long as his career lasted. I suspect it was the
same when headlines were chiseled into stone tablets and the
Sunday Edition was tossed from the back of a woolly mammoth. I
had lost track of how many times I'd sat in audiences just like
this, listening to a glib young man/woman with more teeth than
God intended proclaim the Breakthrough of the Age. It was the
price a feature reporter had to pay.
It could have been worse. I could have had the political
beat.
" . . . tested on over two thousand volunteer subjects . .
. random sampling error of plus or minus one percent . . . "
I was having a bad feeling. That the story would not be
one hundredth as revolutionary as the guy was promising was a
given. The only question was, would there be enough substance
to hack out a story I could sell to Walter?
" . . . registered a sixty-three percent increase in
orgasmic sensation, a two to one rise in the satisfaction
index, and a complete lack of post-coital depression."
And as my old uncle J. Walter Thompson used to say, makes
your wash fifty percent whiter, cleans your teeth, and leaves
your breath alone.
I reached down to the floor and recovered the faxpad each
of us had been given as we came through the door. I called up
the survey questions and scanned through them quickly. My
bullshit detector started beeping so loudly I was afraid Mister
Dynamic Tension would turn around again.
The questions were garbage. There are firms whose purpose
is to work with pollsters and guard against the so-called
"brown-nose effect," that entirely human tendency to tell
people what they want to hear. Ask folks if they like your new
soda pop, they'll tend to say yes, then spit it out when your
back is turned. UniBio had not hired one of these firms.
Sometimes that in itself indicates a lack of confidence in the
product.
"And now, the moment you've been waiting for." There was a
flourish of trumpets. The lights dimmed. Spotlights swirled
over the blue velvet drapes behind the podium, which began to
crawl toward the wings with the salesman aboard.
"United Bioengineers presents--"
"Drum roll," Cricket whispered, a fraction of a second
early. I hit her with my elbow.
"--the future of sex . . . ULTRA-Tingle!"
There was polite applause and the curtains parted to
reveal a nude couple standing, embracing, beneath a violet
spot. Both were hairless. They turned to face us, heads high,
shoulders back. Neither seemed to be male or female. The only
real distinction between them was the hint of breasts and a
touch of eye shadow on the smaller one. There was flat, smooth
skin between each pair of legs.
"Another touchie-feelie," Cricket said. "I thought this
was going to be all new. Didn't they introduce the Tingle
system three years ago?"
"They sure did. Paid a fortune to get half a dozen celebs
to convert, and they still didn't get more than ten, twenty
thousand subscribers. I doubt there's a hundred of them left."
What can you do? They hold a press conference, we have to
send somebody. They throw chum in the water, we start to feed.
Five minutes into the ULTRA-Tingle presentations (that's
how they insisted it be spelled, with caps) I could see this
turkey would be of interest only to the trades. I'm sure my
beefy buddy up front was tickled down to the tips of his
muscle-bound toes.
There were a dozen nude, genderless dancers on stage now,
caressing each others' bodies and posing artistically. Blue
sparks flew from their fingertips.
"That's it for me," I said to Cricket. "You sticking
around?"
"There's a drawing later. Three free conversions--"
"--to the fabulous ULTRA-Tingle System," the salesman
said, finishing her sentence for her.
"Win free sex," I said.
"What's that?"
"Walter says it's the ultimate padloid headline."
"Shouldn't it have something about UFO's in it?"
"Okay. 'Win Free Sex Aboard a UFO to Old Earth.'"
"I'd better stick around for the drawing. My boss would
kill me if I won and wasn't around to collect."
"If I win, they can bring it around to the office." I got
up, put my hand on a massive shoulder, leaned down.
"Those pecs could use some more work," I told the gorilla
hybrid, and got out in a hurry.
#
The foyer had been transformed since my arrival. Huge blue
holos of ULTRA-Tingle convertees entwined erotically in the
corners, and long banquet tables had been wheeled in. Men in
traditional English butler uniforms stood behind the tables
polishing silver and glassware.
It's known as perks. I seldom turn down a free trip in the
course of my profession, and I never turn down free food.
I went to the nearest table and stuck a knife into a pбte'
sculpture of Sigmund Freud and spread the thick brown goo over
a slice of black bread. One of the butlers looked worried and
started toward me, but I glared him back into his place. I put
two thick slices of smoked ham on top of the pбte', spread a
layer of cream cheese, a few sheets of lox sliced so thin you
could read newsprint through it, and topped it all off with
three spoonfuls of black Beluga caviar. The butler watched the
whole operation in increasing disbelief.
It was one of the all-time great Hildy sandwiches.
I was about to bite into it when Cricket appeared at my
elbow and offered me a tulip glass of blue champagne. The
crystal made an icy clear musical note when I touched it to the
rim of her glass.
"Freedom of the press," I suggested.
"The fourth estate," Cricket agreed.
#
The UniBio labs were at the far end of a new suburb nearly
seventy kilometers from the middle of King City. Most of the
slides and escalators were not working yet. There was only one
functioning tube terminal and it was two kilometers away. We'd
come in a fleet of twenty hoverlimos. They were still there,
lined up outside the entrance to the corporate offices, ready
to take us back to the tube station. Or so I thought. Cricket
and I climbed aboard.
"It distresses me greatly to tell you this," the hoverlimo
said, "but I am unable to depart until the demonstration inside
is over, or until I have a passenger load of seven
individuals."
"Make an exception," I told it. "We have deadlines to
meet."
"Are you perhaps declaring an emergency situation?"
I started to do just that, then bit my tongue. I'd get
back to the office, all right, then have a lot of explaining to
do and a big fine to pay.
"When I write this story," I said, trying another tack,
"and when I mention this foolish delay, portraying UniBio in an
unfavorable light, your bosses will be extremely upset."
"This information disturbs and alarms me," said the
hoverlimo. "I, being only a sub-program of an
incompletely-activated routine of the UniBio building computer,
wish only to please my human passengers. Be assured I would go
to the greatest lengths to satisfy your desires, as my only
purpose is to provide satisfaction and speedy transportation.
However," it added, after a short pause, "I can't move."
"Come on," Cricket said. "You ought to know better than to
argue with a machine." She was already getting out. I knew she
was right, but there is a part of me that has never been able
to resist it, even if they don't talk to me.
"Your mother was a garbage truck," I said, and kicked it
in the rubber skirt.
"Undoubtedly, sir. Thank you, sir. Please come back soon,
sir."
#
"Who programmed that toadying thing?" I wondered, later.
"Somebody with a lot of lipstick on his ass," Cricket
said. "What are you so sour about? It's just a short walk. Take
in the scenery."
It was a rather pleasant place, I had to admit. There were
very few people around. You grow up with the odor of people all
around you, all the time, and you really notice it when the
scent is gone. I took a deep breath and smelled freshlypoured
concrete. I drank the sights and sounds and scents of a
new-born world: the sharp primary colors of wire bundles
sprouting from unfinished walls like the first buds on a bare
bough, the untarnished gleam of copper, silver, gold, aluminum,
titanium; the whistle of air through virgin ducts, undeflected,
unmuffled, bringing with it the crisp sharpness of the light
machine oil that for centuries has coated new machinery, fresh
from the factory . . . all these things had an effect on me.
They meant warmth, security, safety from the eternal vacuum,
the victory of humanity over the hostile forces that never
slept. In a word, progress.
I began to relax a little. We picked our way through
jumbles of stainless steel and aluminum and plastic and glass
building components and I felt a peace as profound as I suspect
a Kansas farmer of yesteryear might have felt, looking out over
his rippling fields of wheat.
"Says here they've got an option where you can have sex
over the telephone."
Cricket had gotten a few paces ahead of me, and she was
reading from the UniBio faxpad handout.
"That's nothing new. People started having sex over the
telephone about ten minutes after Alexander Graham Bell
invented it."
"You're pulling my leg. Nobody invented sex."
I liked Cricket, though we were rivals. She works for The
Straight Shit, Luna's second largest padloid, and has already
made a name for herself even though she's not quite thirty
years old. We cover many of the same stories so we see a lot of
each other, professionally.
She'd been female all the time I'd known her, but she'd
never shown any interest in the tentative offers I had made. No
accounting for taste. I'd about decided it was a matter of
sexual orientation--one doesn't ask. It had to be that. If not,
it meant she just wasn't interested in me. Altogether unlikely.
Which was a shame, either way, because I'd harbored a
low-grade lust for her for three years.
"'Simply attach the Tinglemodem (sold separately) to the
primary sensory cluster,'" she read, "'and it's as if your
lover were in the room with you.' I'll bet Mr. Bell didn't
figure on that."
Cricket had a child-like face with an upturned nose and a
brow that tended to wrinkle appealingly when she was
thinking--all carefully calculated, I have no doubt, but no
less exciting because of that. She had a short upper lip and a
long lower one. I guess that doesn't sound so great, but
Cricket made it work. She had one green, normal eye, and the
other one was red, without a pupil. My eyes were the same
except the normal one was brown. The visible red eyes of the
press never sleep.
She was wearing a frilly red blouse that went well with
her silver-blonde hair, and the second badge of our profession:
a battered gray fedora with a card reading PRESS stuck into the
brim. She had recently had herself heeled. It was coming back
into fashion. Personally, I tried it and didn't like it much.
It's a simple operation. The tendons in the soles of the feet
are shortened, forcing your heels up in the air and shifting
the weight to the balls of the feet. In extreme cases it put
you right up on your toes, like a ballerina. Like I said, a
rather silly fad, but I had to admit it produced attractive
lines in the calf, thigh, and buttock muscles.
It could have been worse. Women used to cram their feet
into pointed horrors with tencentimeter heels and hobble around
in a one-gee field to get more or less the same effect. It must
have been crippling.
"Says there's a security interlock available, to insure
fidelity."
"What? Where's that?"
She gave me the faxpad reference. I couldn't believe what
I was reading.
"Is that legal?" I asked her.
"Sure. It's a contract between two people, isn't it?
Nobody's forced to use it."
"It's an electronic chastity belt, that's what it is."
"Worn by both husband and wife. Not like the brave knight
off to the Crusades, getting laid every night while his wife
looks for a good locksmith. Good for the goose, good for the
gander."
"Good for nobody, if you ask me."
Frankly, I was shocked, and not much shocks me. To each
his or her own, that's basic to our society. But ULTRA-Tingle
was offering a coded security system whereby each partner had a
password, unknown to the other, to lock or unlock his or her
partner's sexual response. Without the password, the sexual
center of the brain would not be activated, and sex would be
about as exciting as long division.
To use it would require giving someone veto power over my
own mind. I can't imagine trusting anyone that much. But people
are crazy. That's what my job's all about.
"How about over there?" Cricket said.
"Over where? I mean, what about it?" She was headed toward
a patch of green, an area that, when completed, would be a
pocket park. Trees stood around in pots. There were great rolls
of turf stacked against one wall, like a carpet shop.
"It's probably the best spot we'll find."
"For what?"
"Have you forgotten your offer already?" she asked.
To tell the truth, I had. After this many years, it had
been made more in jest than anything else. She took my hand and
led me onto an unrolled section of turf. It was soft and
springy and cool. She reclined and looked up at me.
"Maybe I shouldn't say it, but I'm surprised."
"Well, Hildy, you never really asked, you know?"
I felt sure I had, but maybe she was right. My style is
more to kid around, make what used to be known as a pass. Some
women don't like that. They'd rather have a direct question.
I stretched out on top of her and we kissed.
We disarranged some of my clothes. She wasn't wearing
enough to worry about. Soon we were moving to rhythms it had
taken Mother Nature well over a billion years to compose. It
was awkward, messy, it lacked flexibility and probably didn't
show much imagination. It sure wasn't ULTRATingle. That didn't
prevent it from being wonderful.
"Wow," she whispered, as I rolled off her and we lay side
by side on the grass. "That was really . . . obsolete."
"Not nearly as obsolete as it was for me."
We looked at each other and burst out laughing.
After a while, she sat up and glanced at the figures
displayed on her wrist.
"Deadline in three hours," she said.
"Me, too." We heard a low hum, looked up, and saw our old
friend the hoverlimo headed in our direction. We ran to catch
it, leaped over the rubber skirt and landed with seven others,
who grumbled and groused and eventually made room for us.
"I am overjoyed to transport you," said the hoverlimo.
"I take that back about the garbage truck," I said.
"Thank you, sir."
=*= =*= =*= =*=
This is not a mystery story. The people you will meet
along the way are not suspects. The things that happen to them
are not clues. I promise not to gather everyone together at the
end and dramatically denounce a culprit.
This is not an adventure story. The survival of the
universe will not be thrown into jeopardy during the course of
it. Some momentous events will occur, and I was present at some
of them but, like most of us, I was simply picked up by the
tornado of history and deposited, like Judy Garland, in a place
I never expected to be. I had little or no hand in the outcome.
In fact, this being real life and not an adventure story, it
can be said there has been no outcome. Some things will change,
and some will remain the same, and most things will simply go
on as they were. If I were a writer of adventure fiction, if I
were manufacturing myself as the adventure's protagonist, I
would certainly have placed myself in the center of more of the
plot's turning points. I would have had myself plunging into
peril, fighting mighty battles, and saving humanity, or
something like that. Instead, many of the most important things
I'm going to tell you about happened far from my sight. I just
tried to stay alive . . .
Don't expect me to draw my sword and set things aright.
Even if I had a sword and knew how to use it, I seldom saw an
unambiguous target, and when I thought I did it was too large
and too far away for my puny swordsmanship to have any effect.
This is not a nuts-and-bolts story. Here you will
find--among many other howlers--the Hildy Johnson Explanation
of Nanobots, their uses, functions, and methods of working. I'm
sure much of it is wildly inaccurate, and all of it is surely
written about fifty I.Q. points below the layman's level . . .
and so what? If you want a nuts-and-bolts story, there have
been many written about the events I will describe. Or you
could always read the instruction manual.
Maybe the nanobot stuff could have come out, but I will
also deal with the central technological conundrum of our time:
that undeniably sentient, great big spooky pile of crystalline
gray matter, wonderful humanitarian, your friend and mine, the
Central Computer. That was unavoidable, but I will say it once
and you'd do well to remember it: I am not a tech. The things I
have to say about matters cybernetic should be taken with an
asteroid-sized tablet of sodium chloride. Literally thousands
of texts have been written concerning how what happened
happened, and why it can't happen again, to any degree of
complexity you're capable of handling, so I refer the
interested reader to them, and good riddance. But I will
divulge to you a secret, because if you've come this far with
me I can't help but like you: take what those techs say with a
grain of salt, too. Nobody knows what's going on with the CC.
So I've told you what kind of story this isn't. Well, what
is it?
That's always harder to say. I thought of calling it How I
Spent the Bicentennial Year, but where's the sex in that?
Where's the headline appeal? I could have called it To The
Stars! That remains to be seen, and it will be my intention
throughout not to lie to you.
What I was afraid it was when I began was the world's
longest suicide note. It's not: I survived. Damn! I just gave
away the ending. But I would hope the more astute of you had
already figured that one out.
All I can promise you is that it's a story. Things do
happen. But people will behave in unrepentantly illogical ways.
Mammoth events will remain resolutely off-stage. Dramatic
climaxes will fizzle like wet firecrackers. Questions will go
unanswered. An outline of this story would be a sorry thing to
behold; any script doctor in the world could instantly suggest
dozens of ways to spruce it up. Hey, have you tried outlining
your own life lately?
I will be the most illogical character of them all. I will
miss opportunities where I could have made a difference, do the
wrong thing, and just generally sleepwalk through some critical
events in my life. I'm sorry, and I hope you all do better than
I have, but I wonder if you will. I will ramble and digress. If
Walter couldn't get me to stop doing that, no one could. I will
inject bits of my rag-tag personal philosophy; I am an
opinionated son of a bitch, or bitch, as the case may be, but
when things threaten to get too heavy I will inject some
inappropriate humor. Though anything one writes will have a
message, I will not try too hard to sell mine to you, partly
because I'm far from sure what it is.
But you can relax on one account: this is not a
metaphorical story. I will not turn into a giant cockroach, nor
will I perish in existential despair. There's even some rock
'em sock 'em action, for those of you who wandered in from the
Saturday Matinee. What more could you ask?
So you've been warned. From here on in, you're on your
own.
#
The tube capsule back to King City was a quarter full. I
used the time to try to salvage something from the wasted
afternoon. Looking around me, I saw that all my colleagues were
busy at the same task. Eyes were rolled up, mouths hung open,
here and there a finger twitched. It had to be either a day
trip from the Catatonic Academy, or the modern press at work.
Call me old-fashioned. I'm the only reporter I know who
still uses his handwriter except to take notes. Cricket was
young enough I doubted she'd ever had one installed. As for the
rest of them, over the last twenty years I'd watched as one
after the other surrendered to the seductions of Direct
Interface, until only I was left, plodding along with antique
technology that happened to suit me just fine.
Okay, so I lied about the open mouths. Not all D.I. users
look like retarded zombies when they interface. But they look
asleep, and I've never been comfortable sleeping in public
places.
I snapped the fingers of my left hand. I had to do it
twice more before the handwriter came on. That worried me; it
was getting harder to find people who still knew how to work on
handwriters.
Three rows of four colored dots appeared on the heel of my
left hand.
By pressing the dots in different combinations with my
fingertips I was able to write the story in shorthand, and
watch the loops and lines scrawl themselves on a strip of
readout skin on my wrist, just where a suicide would slash
himself.
There couldn't be that many of us left who knew Gregg. I
wondered if I ought to apply for a grant under the Preservation
of Vanishing Skills act. Shorthand was certainly useless enough
to qualify. It was at least as obsolete as yodeling, and I'd
once covered a meeting of the Yodeling Society. While I was at
it, maybe I could drum up some interest in the Preservation of
the Penis.
#
(File #Hildy*next avail.*)(code Unitingle)
(headline to come)
#
How far do you trust your spouse? Or better yet, how much
does your spouse trust you!
That's the question you'll be asking yourself if you
subscribe to United Bioengineers' new sex system known as
ULTRA-Tingle.
ULTRA-Tingle is the new, improved, up-dated version of
UniBio's mega-flop of a few years back, known simple as Tingle.
Remember Tingle? Well, don't feel bad. Nobody else does,
either. Somewhere, in some remote cavern in this great dusty
globe we feel sure there must be someone who converted and
stayed that way. Maybe even two of them. Maybe tonight they're
Tingling each other. Or maybe one of them has a tingle-ache.
If you are a bona fide Tingler, call this padloid
immediately, because you've won a prize! Ten percent off on the
cost of your conversion to ULTRA-Tingle. Second prize: a
discount on two conversions!
What does ULTRA-Tingle offer the dedicated sexual
adventurer? In a word: Security!
Maybe you thought sex was between your legs. It's not.
It's in your head, like everything. And that is the miracle of
ULTRA-Tingle. Merely by saying the word you can have the great
thrill of caponizing your mate. You, too, can be a grinning
gelding. Imagine the joys of cerebral castration! Be the first
in your sector to rediscover the art of psychic infibulation!
Who but UniBio could raise impotence into the realm of
integrated circuits, elevate frigidity from aberration to
abnegation?
You don't believe me? Here's how it works:
(to come: *insert UniBio faxpad #4985 ref. 6-
13.*)
You may ask yourself: Whatever happened to oldfashioned
trust? Well, folks, it's obsolete. Just like the penis, which
UniBio assures us will soon go the way of the Do-do bird. So
those of you who still own and operate a trouser-snake, better
start thinking of a place to put it.
No, not there, you fool! That's obsolete, too!
(no thirty)
#
The vocabulary warning light was blinking wildly on the
nail of my index finger. It turned on around paragraph seven,
as I had known it would. But it's fun to write that sort of
thing, even if you know it'll never make it into print. When I
first started this job I would have gone back and worked on it,
but now I know it's better to leave something obvious for
Walter to mess with, in the hope he'll leave the rest alone.
Okay, so the Pulitzer Prize was safe for another year.
#
King City grew the way many of the older Lunar settlements
had: one bang at a time.
The original enclave had been in a large volcanic bubble
several hundred meters below the surface. An artificial sun had
been hung near the top, and engineers drilled tunnels in all
directions, heaping the rubble on the floor, pulverizing it
into soil, turning the bubble into a city park with residential
corridors radiating away from it.
Eventually there were too many people for that park, so
they drilled a hole and dropped in a medium-sized nuclear bomb.
When it cooled, the resulting bubble became Mall Two.
The city fathers were up to Mall Seventeen before new
construction methods and changing public tastes halted the
string. The first ten malls had been blasted in a line, which
meant a long commute from the Old Mall to Mall Ten. They
started curving the line, aiming to complete a big oval. Now a
King City map had seventeen circles tracing out the letter J,
woven together by a thousand tunnels.
My office was in Mall Twelve, level thirty-six, 120
degrees. It's in the editorial offices of The News Nipple, the
padloid with the largest circulation in Luna. The door at 120
opens on what is barely more than an elevator lobby wedged
between a travel agency and a florist. There's a receptionist,
a small waiting room, and a security desk. Behind that are four
elevators that go to actual offices, on the Lunar surface.
Location, location, and location, says my cousin Arnie,
the real estate broker. The way I figure it, time plays a part
in land values, too. The Nipple offices were topside because,
when the rag was founded, topside meant cheap. Walter had had
money even way back then, but he'd been a cheap son of a bitch
since the dawn of time. He got a deal on the seven-story
surface structure, and who cared if it leaked? He liked the
view.
Now everybody likes views, and the fine old homes in
Bedrock are the worst slums in King City. But I suspect one big
blow-out could turn the whole city topsy-turvy again.
I had a corner office on the sixth floor. I hadn't done
much with it other than to put in a cot and a coffeemaker. I
tossed my hat on the cot, slapped the desk terminal until it
lighted up, and pressed my palm against a read-out plate. My
story was downloaded into the main computer in just under a
second. In another second, the printer started to chatter.
Walter prefers hard copy. He likes to make big blue marks on
it. While I waited I looked out over the city. My home town.
The News Nipple Tower is near the bottom of the J of King
City. From it you can see the clusters of other buildings that
mark the sub-surface Malls. The sun was still three days from
rising. The lights of the city dwindled in the distance and
blended in with the hard, unblinking stars overhead.
Almost on the horizon are the huge, pearly domes of King
City farms.
It's pretty by night, not so lovely by day. When the sun
came up it would bathe every exposed pipe and trash pile and
abandoned rover in unsympathetic light; night pulled a curtain
over the shameful clutter.
Even the parts that aren't junk aren't all that
attractive. Vacuum is useful in many manufacturing processes
and walls are of no use for most of them. If something needed
to be sheltered from sunlight, a roof was enough.
Loonies don't care about the surface. There's no ecology
to preserve, no reason at all to treat it as other than a huge
and handy dumping ground. In some places the garbage was heaped
to the third story of the exterior buildings. Give us another
thousand years and we'll pile the garbage a hundred meters deep
from pole to pole.
There was very little movement. King City, on the surface,
looked bombed out, abandoned.
The printer finished its job and I handed the copy to a
passing messenger. Walter would call me about it when it suited
him. I thought of several things I could do in the meantime,
failed to find any enthusiasm for any of them. So I just sat
there and stared out over the surface, and presently I was
called into the master's presence.
#
Walter Editor is what is known as a natural.
Not that he's a fanatic about it. He doesn't subscribe to
one of those cults that refuse all medical treatment developed
since 1860, or 1945, or 2020. He's not impressed with faith
healing. He's not a member of Lifespan, those folks who believe
it's a sin to live beyond the Biblical threescore and ten, or
the Centenarians, who set the number at one hundred. He's just
like most of the rest of us, prepared to live forever if
medical science can maintain a quality life for him. He'll
accept any treatment that will keep him healthy despite a
monstrously dissolute life style.
He just doesn't care how he looks.
All the fads in body styling and facial arrangement pass
him by. In the twenty years I have known him he has never
changed so much as his hair style. He had been born male--or so
he once told me--one hundred and twenty-six years ago, and had
never Changed.
His somatic development had been frozen in his
mid-forties, a time he often described to all who would listen
as "the prime of life." As a result, he was paunchy and
balding. This suited Walter fine. He felt the editor of a major
planetary newspaper ought to be paunchy and balding.
An earlier age would have called Walter Editor a
voluptuary. He was a sensualist, a glutton, monstrously
self-indulgent. He went through stomachs in two or three years,
used up a pair of lungs every decade or so, and needed a new
heart more frequently than most people change gaskets on a
pressure suit. Every time he exceeded what he called his
"fighting weight" by fifty kilos, he'd have seventy kilos
removed. Other than that, with Walter what you saw was what he
was.
I found him in his usual position, leaning back in his
huge chair, big feet propped up on the antique mahogany desk
whose surface displayed not one item made after 1880. His face
was hidden behind my story. Puffs of lavender smoke rose from
behind the pages.
"Sit down, Hildy, sit down," he muttered, turning a page.
I sat, and looked out his windows, which had exactly the same
view I'd seen from my windows but five meters higher and three
hundred degrees wider. I knew there would be three of four
minutes while he kept me waiting. It was one of his managerial
techniques. He'd read in a book somewhere that an effective
boss should keep underlings waiting whenever possible. He
spoiled the effect by constantly glancing up at the clock on
the wall.
The clock had been made in 1860 and had once graced the
wall of a railway station somewhere in Iowa. The office could
be described as Dickensian. The furnishings were worth more
than I was likely to make in my lifetime. Very few genuine
antiquities had ever been brought to Luna. Most of those were
in museums. Walter owned much of the rest.
"Junk," he said. "Worthless." He scowled and tossed the
flimsy sheets across the room. Or he tried to. Flimsy sheets
resist attaining any great speed unless you wad them up first.
These fluttered to the floor at his feet.
"Sorry, Walter, but there just wasn't any other-- "
"You want to know why I can't use it?"
"No sex."
"There's no sex in it! I send you out to cover a new sex
system, and it turns out there's no sex in it. How can that
be?"
"Well, there's sex in it, naturally. Just not the right
kind. I mean, I could write a story about earthworm sex, or
jellyfish sex, but it wouldn't turn anybody on but earthworms
and jellyfish."
"Exactly. Why is that, Hildy? Why do they want to turn us
into jellyfish?"
I knew all about this particular hobbyhorse, but there was
nothing to do but ride it.
"It's like the search for the Holy Grail, or the
Philosopher's Stone," I said.
"What's the Philosopher's Stone?"
The question had not come from Walter, but from behind me.
I was pretty sure I knew who it was. I turned, and saw Brenda,
cub reporter, who for the past two weeks had been my
journalistic assistant--pronounced "copy girl."
"Sit down, Brenda," Walter said. "I'll get to you in a
minute."
I watched her dither around pulling up a chair, folding
herself into it like a collapsible ruler with bony joints
sticking out in all directions, surely too many joints for one
human being. She was very tall and very thin, like so many of
the younger generation. I had been told she was seventeen, out
on her first vocational education try-out. She was eager as a
puppy and not half as graceful.
She irritated the hell out of me. I'm not sure why.
There's the generational thing. You wonder how things can get
worse, you think that these kids have to be the rock bottom,
then they have children and you see how wrong you were.
At least she could read and write, I'll give her that. But
she was so damnably earnest, so horribly eager to please. She
made me tired just looking at her. She was a tabula rasa
waiting for someone to draw animated cartoons on. Her ignorance
of everything outside her particular upper-middle class social
stratum and of everything that had happened more than five
years ago was still un-plumbed.
She opened the huge purse she always carried around with
her and produced a cheroot identical to the one Walter was
smoking. She lit up and exhaled a cloud of lavender smoke. Her
smoking dated to the day after she met Walter Editor. Her name
dated to the day after she met me. Maybe it should have amused
or flattered me that she was so obviously trying to emulate her
elders; it just made me angry. Adopting the name of a famous
fictional reporter had been my idea.
Walter gestured for me to go on. I sighed, and did so.
"I really don't know when it started, or why. But the
basic idea was, since sex and reproduction no longer have much
to do with each other, why should we have sex with our
reproductive organs? The same organs we use for urination, too,
for that matter."
"'If it ain't broke, don't fix it,'" Walter said. "That's
my philosophy. The old-fashioned system worked for millions of
years. Why tamper with it?'
"Actually, Walter, we've already tampered with it quite a
bit."
"Not everybody."
"True. But well over eighty percent of females prefer
clitoral relocation. The natural arrangement didn't provide
enough stimulation during the regular sex act. And just about
that many men have had a testicle tuck. They were too damn
vulnerable hanging out there where nature put them."
"I haven't had one," he said. I made note of that, in case
I ever got into a fight with him.
"Then there's the question of stamina in males," I went
on. "Back on Earth, it was the rare male over thirty who could
consistently get an erection more than three or four times a
day. And it usually didn't last very long. And men didn't have
multiple orgasms. They just weren't as sexually capable as
women."
"That's horrible," Brenda said. I looked at her; she was
genuinely shocked.
"That's an improvement, I'll have to admit," Walter said.
"And there's the entire phenomenon of menstruation," I
added.
"What's menstruation?"
We both looked at her. She wasn't joking. Walter and I
looked at each other and I could read his thoughts.
"Anyway," I said, "you just pointed out the challenge.
Lots of people get altered in one way or another. Some, like
you, stay almost natural. Some of the alterations aren't
compatible with others. Not all of them involve penetration of
one person by another, for instance. What these newsex people
are saying is, if we're going to tamper, why not come up with a
system that is so much better than the others that everyone
will want to be that way? Why should the sensations we
associate with 'sexual pleasure' be always and forever the
result of friction between mucous membranes? It's the same sort
of urge people had about languages back on Earth, back when
there were hundreds of languages, or about weights and
measures. The metric system caught on, but Esperanto didn't.
Today we have a few dozen languages still in use, and more
types of sexual orientation than that."
I settled back in my chair, feeling foolish. But I'd done
my part. Now Walter could get on with whatever he had in mind.
I glanced at Brenda, and she was staring at me with the
wideeyed look of an acolyte to a guru.
Walter took another drag on his cheroot, exhaled, and
leaned back in his chair, fingers laced behind his head.
"You know what today is?" he asked.
"Thursday," Brenda supplied. Walter glanced at her, but
didn't bother to reply. He took another drag.
"It's the one hundred and ninety-ninth anniversary of the
Invasion and Occupation of the Planet Earth."
"Remind me to light a candle and say a novena."
"You think it's funny."
"Nothing funny about it," I said. "I just wonder what it
has to do with me."
Walter nodded, and put his feet down on the floor.
"How many stories have you seen on the Invasion in the
last week? The week leading up to this anniversary?"
I was willing to play along.
"Let's see. Counting the stuff in the Straight Shit, the
items in the Lunarian and the K.C. News, that incisive series
in Lunatime, and of course our own voluminous coverage . . .
none. Not a single story."
"That's right. I think it's time somebody did something
about that."
"While we're at it, let's do a big spread on the Battle of
Agincourt, and the first manned landing on Mars."
"You do think it's funny."
"I'm merely applying a lesson somebody taught me when I
started here. If it happened yesterday, it ain't news. And the
News Nipple reports the news."
"This isn't strictly for the Nipple," Walter admitted.
"Uh-oh."
He ignored my expression, which I hoped was sufficiently
sour, and plowed ahead.
"We'll use cuts from your stories in the Nipple. Most of
'em, anyway. You'll have Brenda to do most of the leg work."
"What are you talking about?" Brenda asked Walter. When
that didn't work, she turned to me. "What's he talking about?"
"I'm talking about the supplement."
"He's talking about the old reporters' graveyard."
"Just one story a week. Will you let me explain?"
I settled back in my chair and tried to turn off my brain.
Oh, I'd fight it hard enough, but I knew I didn't have much
choice when Walter got that look in his eye.
The News Nipple Corporation publishes three pads. The
first is the Nipple itself, updated hourly, full of what Walter
Editor liked to think of as "lively" stories: the celebrity
scandal, the pseudo-scientific breakthrough, psychic
predictions, lovingly bloody coverage of disasters. We covered
the rougher and more proletarian sports, and a certain amount
of politics, if the proposition involved could be expressed in
a short sentence. The Nipple had so many pictures you hardly
needed to read the words. Like the other padloids, it would not
have bothered with any copy but for the government literacy
grants that often provided the financial margin between success
and failure. A daily quota of words was needed to qualify for
the grants. That exact number of words appeared in each of our
issues, including "a," "an," "and," and "the."
The Daily Cream was the intellectual appendix to the
swollen intestine of the Nipple. It came free to every
subscriber of the pad--those government grants again--and was
read by about one in ten, according to our more optimistic