Steel Beach (30 page)

“If you’re interested, the approval ratings on this are well over ninety-nine percent. The favorite flavor, however is Neutral-with-a-Hint-of-Mint. And an unforeseen side benefit is that it works all day, cleaning your breath.”

He’d beaten halitosis, I realized, glumly. How did I feel about that? Shouldn’t I be rejoicing? I recalled the way Liz’s breath had smelled last night, that sour reek of gin. Should a drunk’s breath smell like a puppy’s tongue? I was sure as hell being a crabby old woman about this, even I could see that. But hell, I was an old woman, and often crabby. I’d found that as I got older, I was less tolerant of change, for good or ill.

“How did you hear me?” I asked, before I could get too gloomy thinking about a forever-changing world.

“The radio you switched off is suit-to-suit. Your suit also monitors your vital signs, and transmits them if needed. Using your access voice is defined as an emergency call, not requiring aid.”

“So I’m never out from under the protective umbrella of your eternal vigilance.”

“It keeps you safe,” he said, and I told him to go away.

When Armstrong and Aldrin came in peace for all mankind, it was envisioned that their landing site, in the vacuum of space, would remain essentially unchanged for a million years, if need be. Never mind that the exhaust of lift-off knocked the flag over and tore a lot of the gold foil on the landing stage. The footprints would still be there. And they are. Hundreds of them, trampling a crazy pattern in the dust, going away from the lander, coming back, none of them reaching as far as the visitors’ gallery. There are no other footprints to be seen. The only change the museum curators worked at the site were to set the flag back up, and suspend an ascent stage module about a hundred feet above the landing stage, hanging from invisible wires. It’s not the Apollo 11 ascent stage; that one crash-landed long ago.

Things are often not what they seem.

Nowhere in the free literature or the thousands of plaques and audio-visual displays in the museum will you hear of the night one hundred and eighty years ago when ten members of the Delta Chi Delta fraternity, Luna University Chapter, came around on their cycles. This was shortly after the Invasion, and the site was not guarded as it is now. There had just been a rope around the landing area, not even a visitors’ center; post-Invasion Lunarians didn’t have time for luxuries like that.

The Delts tipped the lander over and dragged it about twenty feet. Their cycles wiped out most of the footprints. They were going to steal the flag and take it back to their dorm, but one of them fell off his mount, cracked his faceplate, and went to that great pledge party in the sky. P-suits were not as safe then as they are now. Horseplay in a p-suit was not a good idea.

But not to worry. Tranquility Base was one of the most documented places in the history of history. Tens of thousands of photos existed, including very detailed shots from orbit.

Teams of selenolography students spent a year restoring the Base. Each square meter was scrutinized, debates raged about the order in which footprints had been laid down, then two guys went out there and tromped around with replica Apollo moonboots, each step measured by laser, and were hauled out on a winch when they were through. Presto! An historical re-creation passing as the real thing. This is not a secret, but very few people know about it. Look it up.

I felt a hand flip the radio switch on my suit back on.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Liz said.

“Quite a coincidence,” I said, thinking about the CC listening in. She joined me, leaning on the railing and looking out over the plain. Behind the far wall of the round visitors’ gallery I could see thousands of people looking toward us through the glass.

“I come here a lot,” she said. “Would you travel a half-million miles in a tinfoil toy like that?”

“I wouldn’t go half a meter in it. I’d rather travel by pogo stick.”

“They were real men in those days. Have you ever thought about it? What it must have been like? They could barely turn around in that thing. One of them made it back with half the ship blown up.”

“Yeah. I have thought about it. Maybe not as much as you.”

“Think about this, then. You know who the
real
hero was? In my opinion? Good old Mike Collins, the poor sap who stayed in orbit. Whoever designed this operation didn’t think it out. Say something went wrong, say the lander crashes and these two die instantly. There’s Collins up in orbit, all by himself. How are you gonna deal with that? No ticker-tape parade for Mike. He gets to attend the memorial service, and spend the rest of his life wishing he’d died with them. He gets to be a national goat, is what he gets.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“So things go right—and they did, though I’ll never understand how—so who does the Planetary Park get named after? Why, the guy who flubbed his ‘first words’ from the surface.”

“I thought that was a garbled transmission.”

“Don’t you believe it. ’Course, if I’d had two billion people listening in, I might have fucked it up, too. That part was probably scarier than the thought of dying, anyway, having everybody
watching
you die, and hoping that if it
did
go rotten, it wouldn’t be your fault. This little exercise cost twenty, thirty billion dollars, and that was back when a billion was real money.”

It was still real money to me, but I let her ramble on. This was her show; she’d brought me here, knowing only that I was interested in telling her something in a place where the CC couldn’t overhear. I was in her hands.

“Let’s go for a walk,” she said, and started off. I hurried to catch up with her, followed her down several flights of stairs to the surface.

You can cover a lot of ground on the surface in a fairly short time. The best gait is a hop from the ball of the foot, swinging each leg out slightly to the side. There’s no point in jumping too high, it just wastes energy.

I know there are still places on Luna where the virgin dust stretches as far as the eye can see. Not many, but a few. The mineral wealth of my home planet is not great, and all the interesting places have been identified and mapped from orbit, so there’s little incentive to visit some of the more remote regions. By remote, I mean far from the centers of human habitation; any spot on Luna is easily reachable by a lander or crawler.

Everywhere I’d ever been on the surface looked much like the land around Tranquility Base, covered with so many tracks you wondered where the big crowd had gone, since there was likely to be not a single soul in sight but whatever companions you were traveling with. Nothing ever goes away on Luna. It has been continuously inhabited by humans for almost two and a half centuries. Every time someone has taken a stroll or dropped an empty oxygen tank the evidence is still there, so a place that got two visitors every three or four years looks like hundreds of people have gone by just a few minutes before. Tranquility got considerably more than that. There was not a square millimeter of undisturbed dust, and the litter was so thick it had been kicked into heaps here and there. I saw empty beer cans with labels a hundred and fifty years old lying next to some they were currently selling in Armstrong Park.

After a bit some of that thinned out. The tracks tended to group themselves into impromptu trails. I guess humans tend to follow the herd, even when the herd is gone and the land is so flat it doesn’t matter
where
you go.

“You left too early last night,” Liz said, the radio making it sound as if she was standing beside me when I could see her twenty meters in front. “There was some excitement.”

“I thought it was pretty exciting while I was there.”

“Then you must have seen the Duke of Bosnia tangling with the punchbowl.”

“No, I missed that. But I tangled with
him
earlier.”

“That was you? Then it’s your fault. He was in a foul mood. Apparently you didn’t mark him enough; he figures if he hasn’t lost a kilo or two of flesh after pounding the sheets, somebody just wasn’t trying.”

“He didn’t complain.”

“He wouldn’t. I swear, I think I’m related to him, but that man is so stupid, he hasn’t got the brains God gave a left-handed screwdriver. After you went home he got drunk as a waltzing pissant and decided somebody had put poison in the punch, so he tipped it over and picked it up and started banging people over the head with it. I had to come over and coldcock him.”

“You do give interesting parties.”

“Ain’t it the truth? But that’s not what I was gonna tell you about. We were having so much fun we completely forgot about the gifts, so I gathered everybody around and started opening them.”

“You get anything nice?”

“Well, a few had the sense to tape the receipt to the box. I’ll clear a little money on that. So I got to one that said it was from the Earl of Donegal, which should have tipped me off, but what do I know about the goddamn United Kingdom? I thought it was a province of Wales, or something. I knew I didn’t know the guy, but who can keep track? I opened it, and it was from the Irish Republican Pranksters.”

“Oh, no.”

“The hereditary enemies of my clan. Next thing I know we’re all covered with this green stuff, I don’t wanna know where it came from, but I know what it smelled like. And that was the end of
that
party. Just as well. I had to mail half the guests home, anyway.”

“I hate those jerks. On St. Patrick’s day you don’t dare sit down without looking for a green whoopee cushion.”

“You think you got it bad? Every mick in King City comes gunning for me on the seventeenth of March, so they can tell their buddies how they put one over on the bleedin’ Princess o’ Wales. And it’s only gonna get worse now.”

“Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.”

“I’ll crown ’em, all right. I know where Paddy Flynn lives, and I’m gonna get even if it harelips the Mayor and the whole damn city council.”

I reflected that you’d have to go a long way to find somebody as colorful as the new Queen. Once again I wondered what I was doing out here. I looked behind me, saw the four-story stadium around the landing site just about to vanish over the horizon. When it was gone, it would be easy to get lost out here. Not that I was worried about that. The suit had about seventeen different kinds of alarms and locators, a compass, probably things I didn’t even know about. No real need for girl-scout tricks like noting the position of your shadow.

But the sense of aloneness was a little oppressive.

And illusory. I spotted another hiking party of five on the crest of a low rise off to my left. A flash of light made me look up, and I saw one of the Grand Mal trains arcing overhead on one of the free-trajectory segments of its route. It was spinning end over end, a maneuver I remember vividly since I’d been in the front car, hanging from my straps and watching the surface sweep by every two seconds when a big glob of half-digested caramel corn and licorice splattered on the glass in front of me, having just missed my neck. At that moment I had been regretting everything I had eaten for the last six years, and wondering if I was going to be seeing a good portion of it soon, right there beside the tasty treats on the windshield. Keeping it down may be one of the most amazing things I ever did.

“You ever ride that damn thing?” Liz asked. “I try it out every couple years, when I’m feeling mean. I swear, first time I think my ass sucked six inches of foam rubber out of the seat cushion. After that, it’s not so bad. About like a barbed wire enema.”

I didn’t reply—I’m not sure how one
could
reply to statements like that—because as she spoke she had stopped and waited for me to catch up, and she was punching buttons on a small device on her left hand. I saw a pattern of lights flash, mostly red, then they turned green one by one. When the whole panel was green she opened a service hatch on the front of my suit and studied whatever she found in there. She poked buttons, then straightened and made a thumbs-up gesture at me. She hung the device from a strap around my neck and regarded me with her fists on her hips.

“So, you want to talk where nobody can listen in. Well, talk, baby.”

“What’s that thing?”

“De-bugger. By which, it buggers up all the signals your suit is sending out, but not enough so they’ll send out a search party. The machines up in orbit and down underground are getting the signals that keep them happy, but it’s not the real stuff; it’s what I want them to hear. Can’t just step out here and cut off your emergency freaks. That signal goes away, it’s an emergency in itself. But nobody can hear us now, take my word for it.”

“What if we have a real emergency?”

“I was about to say, don’t crack open if you want to keep a step ahead of your pallbearers. What’s on your mind?”

Once again I found it hard to get started. I knew once I got the first words out it would be easy enough, but I agonized over those first words more than any first-time novelist.

“This may take some time,” I hedged.

“It’s my day off. Come on, Hildy; I love you, but cut the cards.”

So I started in on my third telling of my litany of woe. You get better at these things as you go along. This time didn’t take as long as it had with either Callie or Fox. Liz walked along beside me, saying nothing, guiding me back to some trail she was following when I started to stray.

The thing was, I’d decided to tell it this time where it logically should have begun the other two times: with my suicide attempts. And it was a little easier to tell it to someone I didn’t know well, but not much. I was thankful she remained silent through to the end. I don’t think I could have tolerated any of her unlikely folk sayings at that point.

And she stayed quiet for several minutes after I’d finished. I didn’t mind that, either. As before, I was experiencing a rare moment of peace for having unburdened myself.

Liz is not quite in the Italian class of gesturing, but she did like to move her hands around when she talked. This is frustrating in a p-suit. So many gestures and nervous mannerisms involve touching part of the head or body, which is impossible when suited up. She looked as if she’d like to be chewing on a knuckle, or rubbing her forehead. Finally she turned and squinted at me suspiciously.