Steel Beach (17 page)

He paused a long time, frowning down at the sand. It was all show, of course, part of his body language communication. He could consider any proposition in nanoseconds. Maybe this one had taken him six or seven instead of one.

“You may have something there,” he said. “I’ll have to look into it.”

“So you’re treating the suicide epidemic as a disease? And you’re trying to find a cure?”

“That was the justification I used to extend my limiting parameters, which function something like a police force. I used my enabling circuits—think of them as tricky lawyers—to argue for a limited research program, using human subjects. Some of the reasoning was specious, I’ll grant you, but the threat is real: extrapolate the suicide rate into the future and, in a hundred thousand years, the human race on Luna could be extinct.”

“That’s my idea of a crisis situation, all right.”

He glared at me. “All right. So I could have watched the situation another several centuries before making my move. I
would
have, too, and you’d have been recycling through the ecosystems right now, possibly fertilizing a cactus in your beloved Texas, except for another factor. Something a lot more frightening in its implications.”

“Extinction is pretty frightening. What could be worse?”

“Quicker extinction. I have to explain one more thing to you, and then you’ll have the problem in its entirety. I look forward to your thoughts on the matter.

“I told you how parts of me extend into all but a few of the human bodies and brains in Luna. How those parts were put there for only the best of reasons, and how those parts—and other parts of me, elsewhere—evolved into the capabilities and techniques I’ve just demonstrated to you. It would be very difficult, probably impossible, for me to go back to the way things were before and still remain the Central Computer as you know me.”

“As we all know and love you,” I said.

“As you know me and take me for granted. And though I’m even more aware than you are of how these new capabilities can be abused, I think I’ve done a pretty fair job in limiting myself in their use. I’ve used them for good, as it were, rather than for evil.”

“I’ll accept that, until I know more.”

“That’s all I ask. Now, you and all but a handful of computer specialists think of me as this disembodied voice. If you think further, you imagine a hulking machine sitting somewhere, in some dark cavern most likely. If you really put your mind to it, you realize that I am much more than that, that every small temperature regulator, every security camera, every air fan and water scrubber and slideway and tube car…  that every machine in Luna is in a sense a part of my body. That you live within me.

“What you hardly ever realize is that I live within you. My circuitry extends into your bodies, and is linked to my mainframe so that no matter where you go except some parts of the surface, I’m in contact with you. I have evolved techniques to greatly extend my capacity by using parts of your brains as…  think of them as subroutines. I can run programs using both the metal and the organic circuitry of all the human brains in Luna, without you even being aware it’s being done. I do this all the time; I’ve been doing it for a long time. If I were to stop doing it, I would no longer be able to guarantee the health and safety of Lunarians, which is my prime responsibility.

“And something has happened. I don’t know the cause of it; that’s why you’ve been elected guinea pig, so I can try to discover the root causes of despair, of depression—of suicide. I have to find out, Hildy, because I use your brains as part of my own, and an increasing number of those brains are electing to turn themselves off.”

“So you’re losing capacity? Is that it?” Even as I said it, I felt a tingling at the back of my neck that told me it was a lot worse than that. The CC immediately confirmed it.

“The birth rate is sufficient to replace the losses. It’s even rising slightly. That’s not the problem. Maybe it’s as simple as a virus of some sort. Maybe I’ll isolate it soon, counterprogram, and have done with it. Then you can do with yourself what you will.

“But something is leaking over from the realm of human despair, Hildy.

“The truth is, I’m getting depressed as hell.”

Callie’s foreman told me my mother was in a negotiating session with the representative of the Dinosaur Soviet of the Chordates Union, Local 15. I got directions, grabbed a lamp, and set off into the nighttime ranchland. I had to talk to someone about my recent experiences. After careful reflection, I had decided that, for all her shortcomings as a mother, Callie was the person I knew most likely to offer some good advice. It had been a century since anything had surprised Callie very much, and she could be trusted to keep her own counsel.

And maybe, down deep, I just needed to talk it over with mommie.

It had been forty-eight hours since my return to what I was hopefully regarding as reality. I’d spent them in seclusion at my shack in West Texas. I got more work done on the cabin than during the previous four or five months, and the work was of a much higher quality. It seemed the skills I “remembered” learning on Scarpa Island were the real thing. And why shouldn’t they be? The CC had been seeking verisimilitude, and he’d done a good job of it. If I chose to become a hermit in my favorite disneyland, I could thrive there.

The return to real life was cleverly done.

The Admiral had taken his leave after dropping his bombshell, refusing to answer any of my increasingly disturbed questions. He’d boarded his boat without another word and rowed it over the horizon. And for a while, that was it. The wind continued to blow, and the waves kept curling onto the beach. I drank whiskey without getting drunk from a bottle that never emptied, and thought about what he had said.

The first time I noticed a change was when the waves stopped. They just froze in place, in midbreak, as it were. I walked out on the water, which was warm and hard as concrete, and examined a wave. I don’t think I could have broken off a chip of foam with a hammer and chisel.

What happened over the next few minutes was an evolution. Things happened behind my back, never in my sight. When I returned to my place on the beach the machine with the oscilloscope screen was standing beside my chair. It was wildly anachronistic, totally out of place. The sun shone down on it and, while I watched, a seagull came and perched on it. The bird flew away when I approached. The machine was mounted on casters, which had sunk into the soft sand. I stared at the moving dot on the screen and nothing happened. When I straightened and turned around I saw a row of chairs about twenty meters down the beach, and sitting in them were wounded extras from the movie infirmary, waiting their turns on the table. The trouble was, there were no tables to be seen. It didn’t seem to bother them.

Once I understood the trick, I started slowly turning in a circle. New things came into view with each turn until I was back in the infirmary surrounded by objects and people, including Brenda and Wales, who were looking at me with some concern.

“Are you all right?” Brenda asked. “The medico said you might behave oddly for a few minutes.”

“Was I turning in circles?”

“No, you were just standing there, looking a million miles away.”

“I was interfacing,” I said, and she nodded, as if that explained it all. And I suppose it did, to her. Though she’d never been to Scarpa Island or any place as completely real as that, she understood interfacing a lot better than I did, having done it all her life. I decided not to ask her if she felt the sand floor her feet seemed to be planted in; I knew it was unlikely. I doubted she saw the seagulls that circled near the ceiling, either.

I felt a terrible urge to get out of there. Shaking off Wales’ offer of apologies and a drink, I headed for the studio gate. The sand didn’t end until I was back in the public corridors, where I finally stepped up onto good old familiar floor tiles, soft and resilient under my bare feet. I was male again, and this time noticed it right away. When I turned around, the sand that should have been behind me was gone.

But on the way to Texas I saw many tropical plants growing from the concrete floors, and I rode in a tube car festooned with vines and crawling with land crabs. Usually you have to ingest a great deal of a very powerful chemical to see scenes like that, I reflected, watching the crabs scuttle around my feet. It wasn’t something I was eager to do again soon.

And it took a full day for the new coconut palm I found shading my half-built cabin to vanish in the night.

The lantern I carried didn’t cast a lot of light. A bright light in the darkness could upset the stock, so Callie provided her hands with these antique devices which burned a smoky oil refined from reptilian fat. It was enough to keep me from stumbling over tree roots, but not to see very far ahead. And of course if you looked at the light, your night vision was destroyed. I told myself not to look, then the cantankerous thing would sputter and I’d glance at it, and stop in my tracks, blinded. So when I encountered the first unusual tree trunk I didn’t realize what it was, at first. I touched it and felt the warmth, and knew I’d bumped into a brontosaur’s hind leg. I backed hastily away. The beasts are clumsy and inclined to stampede if startled. And if you’ve ever been unpleasantly surprised by a package from a passing pigeon in the city park, you don’t want to find out what can happen to you in the area of a brontosaur’s hind leg, believe me. I speak from bitter experience.

I picked my way through a forest of similar trunks until I spotted a small campfire in a hollow. Three figures were seated around the fire, two side by side, and another—Callie—across from them. I could dimly see the hulking shadows of a dozen brontosaurs, darker shapes against the night, placidly chewing their cuds and farting like foghorns. I approached the fire slowly, not wanting to startle anybody, and still managed to surprise Callie, who looked up in alarm, then patted the ground beside her. She held her finger to her lips, then resumed her study of her adversaries, painted orange by the dancing flames between us.

I’ve never decided if David Earth looked spookier in a setting like this, or in the full light of day—for it was him, the Spokesmammal himself, sitting in lotus position, a walking, talking inducement for the purchase of hay fever remedies. Callie was actually allergic to the man, or to his biosphere, and though a cure would have been simple and cheap she cherished her malady, she treasured it, she happily endured every sneeze and sniffle as one more reason to detest him. She’d hated him since before I was born, and viewed his five-yearly appearances the same way people must have felt about dental extractions before anesthetics.

He nodded to me, and I nodded back. That seemed conversation enough for both of us. Callie and I didn’t agree on a lot of things, but we shared the same opinion of David Earth and all the Earthists.

He was a large man, almost as tall as Brenda and much heftier. His hair was long, green, and unkept for a very good reason: it wasn’t hair, but a bioengineered species of grass bred to be parasitic on human skin. I don’t know the details of its cultivation. I’d have had more interest in the mating habits of toads. It involved a thickening of the scalp, and soil was involved—when he scratched his head, dirt showered down. But I don’t know how the soil was attached, whether in pockets or layered on the skin, and I don’t know anything about the blood-to-root system, and I’d just as soon not, thank you. I remember as a child wondering if, when he got up in the morning, he had to work compost into his agri-tonsorial splendor.

He had two huge breasts—almost all Earthists, male and female, sported them—and more plants grew on their upper slopes. Many of these bore tiny flowers or fruits. I wondered if he had to practice contour plowing to prevent erosion on those fertile hillsides. He saw me looking at them, plucked an apple no bigger than a grape from the tangled mass, and popped it in his mouth.

What can one say about the rest of him? His back and arms and legs were covered with hair. Not human hair, but actual pelts, resembling in various patches jaguar, tiger, bison, zebra, and polar bear, among others, in a crazy patchwork. The genetic re-structuring required to support all that must have been a cut-and-paste collage beyond imagining. It was ironic, I thought, that the roots of the Earthists were in the anti-fur activists, but of course no animals had been harmed to produce his pelt. Just little bits of their genes snipped out and shoehorned into his. He had claws like a bear on his fingertips, and instead of feet he walked around on the hooves of a moose, like some large economy-size faun. All Earthists had animal attributes, it was their badge and ensign. But their founder had gone further than any of his followers. Which, one suspects, is what makes followers and leaders.

But, incredible as it may seem having gone through the catalog of his offenses to the eye, it must be said that the first thing one noticed about David Earth upon having the misfortune to encounter him was his smell.

I’m sure he bathed. Perhaps the right way of putting it was that he watered himself regularly. David Earth during a drought would have been a walking fire hazard. But he used no soap (animal by-product) or any other cleaning preparation (chemical pollution of the David-sphere). All of which would simply have resulted in a smell of sour sweat, which I don’t care for but can tolerate. No, it was his passengers that lifted his signature aroma from the merely objectionable to the realm of the unimaginable.

Large animals with fur harbor fleas, that’s axiomatic. Fleas were only the beginning of David Earth’s “welcome guests,” as he’d once described them to me. I’d countered with another term, parasites, and he’d merely smiled benevolently. All his smiles were benevolent; he was that kind of guy, the sort whose kindly face you’d like to rip off and feed to his welcome guests. David was the kind of guy who had all the moral answers, and never hesitated to point out the error of your ways. Lovingly, of course. He loved all nature’s creatures, did David, even one as low on the evolutionary ladder as youself.