Steel Beach (2 page)

“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 freshly-poured 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 ten centimeter 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 ensure 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 ULTRA-Tingle. 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.