Steel Beach (12 page)

“Nice to see a woman happy in her work,” I said. She looked over at me.

“Hildy,” Cricket said, “have you met Princess Saxe-Coburg? She’s chief of special effects at NLM.”

“We’ve met.”

The Princess frowned at me, then recognition dawned. She got off her stool and came toward me, a little unsteady. She put her nose inches from mine.

“Sure. You pulled out on me a few minutes ago. Not a nice thing to do to a lady.”

At that range, I could see what was odd about her eyes. She was wearing a pair of antique projection contacts, small round flat-TV screens that floated over the cornea. I could make out the ring of solar cells that powered them, and the flyspeck chip that held the memory.

They’d been introduced just before the Invasion under a variety of trade names, but the one that stuck was Bedroom Eyes. After all, though they could reflect quite a variety of moods, if you were close enough to see the little pictures the mood you were looking for was probably sexual arousal. The more modest models would show a turned-back bed, a romantic scene from an old movie, or even, god help us, waves crashing on a beach. Others made no pretensions, getting right to the erection or spread thighs. Of course, they could reflect other moods, as well, but people were seldom close enough to make them out.

I’d never seen projection contacts worn by someone quite as stoned as the Princess was. What they were projecting was an interesting illusion: it was as if I were looking through two holes into a hollow head. Remnants of an exploded brain were collapsed at the bottom. Cracks in the skull let in light. And swinging from stray synapses like vines in a jungle were a menagerie of cartoon characters, from Mickey Mouse to Baba Yaga.

The image disturbed me. I wondered why anyone would want to do that to their brain. From wondering why
she
would want to, I quickly got to why
I
would want to, and that was leading me quickly to a place I didn’t want to go. So I turned away from her and saw Andrew MacDonald sitting at the other end of the bar like a carrot-topped Hibernian albatross.

“Did you know she’s the Princess of Wales?” Cricket was saying. “She’s first in line to the throne of England.”

“And Scotland, and Wales,” said the Princess. “Hell, and Ireland, and Canada and India. I might as well re-claim the whole Empire while I’m at it. If my mother ever dies, it’ll all belong to me. Of course, there’s the little matter of the Invaders.”

“Up the British,” Cricket said, and they clinked their glasses together.

“I met the King once,” I said. I drained my drink and slammed it down on the bar. Deep Throat caused it to vanish, and began concocting another.

“Did you really?”

“He was a friend of my mother. In fact, he’s a possible candidate to be my father. Callie has never told me and never will, but they were friendly together at about the right time. So, if you apply modern laws of bastardy, I might have a claim that supersedes yours.” I glanced at MacDonald again. Albatross? Hell, the man was more than a bird of evil omen, more than a stormy petrel or a croaking raven. He was Cassandra. He was a tropical depression, bad breath, a black cat across my path. Everywhere I turned, there he was, a dog humping my leg. He was a ladder in the stocking of my life. He was snake eyes.

I hated him. I felt like punching him in the nose.

“Watch what you say,” the Princess cautioned. “Remember what happened to Mary, Queen of Scots.”

I punched her in the nose.

She walked backward a few rubber-legged steps, then sat down on the floor. In the ensuing silence, Cricket whispered in my ear.

“I think she was kidding,” she said.

For a few moments the whole place was quiet. Everyone was watching us expectantly; they love a good brawl at the Blind Pig. I looked at my clenched fist, and the Princess touched her bloody nose with her hand, then looked at her palm. We both looked up at the same time and our eyes met. And she came off the floor and launched herself at me and started breaking all the bones in my body that she could reach.

My hitting her had nothing to do with anything she had said or done; at that moment in my life I would have hit anyone standing next to me. But I’d have been a lot better off hitting Cricket. In the Princess of Wales, I’d picked the wrong opponent. She was taller than me and out-massed me. There was probably a ten-centimeter difference in reach between us, and I was on the short end of it. But most importantly, she had spent the last forty years staging cinematic fights, and she knew every trick in the book, and a lot that never got into the book.

I’m tempted to say I got in two or three good punches. Cricket says I did, but it might have been just to raise my spirits. The truth is I can’t remember much from the time her horrid white teeth first filled my vision to the time I ripped a meter-long gash in the carpet with my face.

To get to the carpet I’d first had to smash through a table full of drinks. I used my face for that, too. Before the table I had been flying, rather cleverly, I thought, and the first real fun I’d had in many long minutes, but how I came to be flying was a point I was never too clear on. It seems safe to say that the Princess hurled me in some manner, holding on to some part of my anatomy and then releasing it; Cricket said it was my ankle, which would account for the room whirling around so quickly just before I flew. Before that I had vague memories of the bar mirror shattering, people scattering, blood spattering. Then I crashed through the table.

I rolled over and spit out carpeting. Horses were milling nervously all around me. Actually it was the centaur extras, whose table I’d just ruined. I resolved to buy them all a round of drinks. Before I could do that, though, there was the Princess again, lifting me by the shoulder and drawing back a bloody fist.

Then someone took hold of her arm from behind, and the punch never landed. She stood up and turned to face her challenger. I let my head rest against the ruins of a chair and watched as she tried to punch Andrew MacDonald.

There was really no point in it. It took her a long time to realize it, as her blood was up and she wasn’t thinking straight. So she kept throwing punches, and they kept just missing, or hitting him harmlessly on the elbows or glancing off his shoulders. She tried kicking, and the kicks were always just a little off their target.

He never threw a punch. He didn’t have to. After a time, she was standing there breathing hard. He wasn’t even sweating. She straightened and held up her hands, palms outward.

I must have dozed off for a moment. Eventually I became aware of the Princess, Cricket, and MacDonald, three indistinct round faces hanging above me like a pawnbroker’s sign.

“Can you move your legs?” MacDonald asked.

“Of course I can move my legs.” What a silly question. I’d been moving my legs for a hundred years.

“Then move them.”

I did, and MacDonald frowned deeper.

“His back’s probably broken,” said Wales.

“Must have happened when he landed on the railing.”

“Can you feel anything?”

“Unfortunately, yes.” By that time most of the drugs were wearing off, and everything from the waist up was hurting very badly. Deep Throat arrived and lifted my head. He had a painkiller in his hand, a little plastic cube with a wire which he plugged into the socket at the base of my skull. He flicked the switch, and I felt a lot better. I looked down and watched as they removed the splintered chair leg which had pierced my hip.

Since that wasn’t a particularly diverting sight, I looked around the room. Already cleaning robots were picking up broken glassware and replacing shattered tables; Deep Throat is no stranger to brawls, and he always keeps a supply of furniture. In another few minutes there would be no sign that I had almost destroyed the place five minutes ago. Well, I
had
almost destroyed the place, in the sense that it was my hurtling body that had done most of the damage.

I felt myself being lifted. MacDonald and Wales had made a hammock with their arms. It was like riding in a sedan chair.

“Where are we going?”

“You’re not in any immediate danger,” MacDonald said. “Your back is broken, and that should be fixed soon, so we’re taking you across the corridor to the NLF Studios. They have a good repair shop there.”

The Princess got us past the gate guard. We passed about a dozen sound stage doors, and I was brought into the infirmary.

Which was jammed like Mainhardt’s Department Store on Christmas Eve. It seemed NLF was doing a big scene from some war epic, and most of the available beds were taken by maimed extras patiently waiting their turn, counting up the triple-time salary they drew for injured downtime.

The room had been dressed as a field hospital for the picture, apparently doing double duty when not actually treating cinematic casualties. I pegged it as twentieth century—a vintage season for wars—maybe World War Two, or the Vietnam conflict, but it could easily have been the Boer War. We were under a canvas roof and the place was cluttered with hanging IV bottle props.

MacDonald returned from a conference with one of the technicians and stood looking down at me.

“He says it’ll be about half an hour. I could have you taken to your own practitioner if you want to; it might be quicker.”

“Don’t bother. I’m in no hurry. When they patch me up, I’ll probably just get up and do something foolish again.”

He didn’t say anything. There was something about his demeanor that bothered me—as if I needed anything else about him to bother me.

“Look,” I said. “Don’t ask me to explain why I did it. I don’t even know myself.”

Still he said nothing.

“Either spit it out, or take your long face and park it somewhere else.”

He shrugged.

“I just have a problem with a man attacking a woman, that’s all.”

“What?” I was sure I had misunderstood him. He wasn’t making any sense. But when he didn’t repeat his astonishing statement, I had to assume I’d heard him correctly.

“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.

“Nothing, of course. But when I was young, it was something you simply didn’t do. I know it no longer makes sense, but it still bothers me to see it.”

“I’ll be sure to tell the Mean Bitch you feel that way. If they’ve put her back together after your last bout, that is.”

He looked embarrassed.

“You know, that was a problem for me, early in my career. I wouldn’t fight female opponents. I was getting a bad reputation and missing a lot of important match-ups because of it. When some competitors started getting sex changes simply so they could have a go at me, I realized how ridiculous I was being. But to this day I have to psych myself something terrible to get into the ring with someone who’s currently female.”

“That’s why you never hit…  does the Princess have a first name?”

“I don’t know. But you’re wrong. I wanted to stop her, but I didn’t want to hurt her. Frankly, you had it coming.”

I looked away, feeling terrible. He was right.

“She’s feeling bad about it, though. She said she just couldn’t seem to stop, once she got going.”

“I’ll send her the repair bill. That should cheer her up.”

Cricket arrived from somewhere. She had a lighted cigarette which she placed in my mouth, grinning.

“Got it from the prop department,” she said. “They always used to give these to wounded soldiers. I can’t imagine why.”

I puffed on it. It wasn’t tobacco, thank god.

“Cheer up,” Cricket said. “You tore up her fists pretty good.”

“I’m clever that way; I pounded them to hamburger with my chin.”

I suddenly felt an alarming urge to cry. Holding it back, I asked both of them to leave me alone for a while. They did, and I lay there smoking, studying the canvas ceiling. There were no answers written there.

Why had the taste of life turned so bitter for me in the last weeks?

I had sort of drifted away. When I came back, Brenda was bending over me. Considering her height, she had a long way to bend.

“How’d you find me?” I asked her.

“I’m a reporter, remember? It’s my business to find things out.”

I thought of several cutting replies, but something about the look on her face made me hold them back. Puppy love. I had vague memories of how badly that could hurt, when it wasn’t returned.

And to give her her due, she was improving. Maybe she
would
be a reporter, some day.

“You needn’t have bothered. It’s not like I’m badly hurt. The head injuries were minimal.”

“I’m not surprised. It would take a lot to hurt your head.”

“The brain wasn’t injured at…  ” I stopped, realizing she had just taken a jab at me. It had been pretty feeble, it hardly qualified as a joke—she might
never
master that skill—but it was something. I grinned at her.

“I was going to stop by Texas and bring that doctor…  what was it you called him?”

“Sawbones. Pillroller. Quack. Caulker. Nepenthe. Leech. Lazarmonger.”

Her smile grew a little glassy; I could see her filing the terms away for later research.

I was smiling, but the truth is, even with current medical practices, being paralyzed from the waist down is a frightening thing. We have an entirely different attitude toward our bodies than most humans down the ages, we don’t fear injury and we can turn off pain and we generally treat flesh and bone as just items to be fixed, but when things are badly wrong something in the most primitive level of our brain stands up on its hind legs and howls at the Earth. I was having a galloping anxiety attack that the painkiller plugged into my medulla wasn’t dealing with at all. I have no idea if Brenda realized this, but her presence at my bedside was strangely comforting. I was glad she was there. I took her hand.

“Thanks for coming,” I said. She squeezed my hand, then looked away.

Eventually the planned casualties stopped streaming in, and a team of medicos assembled around me. They plugged me in to a dozen machines, studied the results, huddled, and murmured, just as if what they thought really mattered, as if the medical computer was not entirely in control of my diagnosis and treatment.