Steel Beach (52 page)

“I thought you’d ride up on a horse,” he said. “I kept listening for it. You surprised me, coming on foot.”

“You have any idea how much up-keep there is on a horse?”

“Not the foggiest.”

“A lot, trust me. I ride a bicycle. I’ve got the finest Dursley Pedersen in Texas, with pneumatic tyres.”

“So where is it?” He reached for the pitcher and poured himself another glass of water, something everyone does when eating my chili.

“Had a little accident. Were you waiting long?”

“About an hour. I checked the schoolhouse but nobody was there.”

“I’m only there mornings. I have another job.” I got a copy of tomorrow’s
Texian
and handed it to him. He looked at the colophon, then at me, and started scanning it without comment.

“How’s your daughter doing? Lisa?”

“She’s fine. Only she wants to be called Buster now. Don’t ask me why.”

“They go through stages like that. My students do, anyway. I did.”

“So did I.”

“Last time you said she was into that father thing. Is she still?”

He made a gesture that took in his new body, and shrugged.

“What do
you
think?”

My researches turned up one listing that seemed an appropriate place to begin. This fellow was the only living practitioner of his craft, he vas ze zpitting image of Zigmunt Frrreud, unt he zpoke viz an aggzent zat zounded zomezing like zis. Freudian psychotherapy is not precisely debunked, of course, many schools use it as a foundation, merely throwing out this or that tenet since found to be based more on Mr. Freud’s own hang-ups than any universal human condition.

How would a strict Freudian handle the realities of Lunar society? I wondered. This is how:

Ziggy had me recline on a lovely couch in an office that would have put Walter’s to shame. He asked me what seemed to be the problem, and I talked for about ten minutes with him taking notes behind me. Then I stopped.

“Very interesting,” he said, after a moment. He asked me about my relationship with my mother, and that was good for another half hour of talk on my part. Then I stopped.

“Very interesting,” he said, after an even longer pause. I could hear his pen scratching on his note pad.

“So what do you think, doc?” I asked, turning to crane my neck at him. “Is there any hope for me?”

“I zink,” he zaid, and that’s enough of
zat
, “that you present a suitable case for therapy.”

“So what’s my problem?”

“It’s far too early to tell. I’m struck by the incident you related between you and your mother when you were, what…  fourteen? When she brought home the new lover you did not approve of.”

“I didn’t approve of much of anything about her at that time. Plus, he was a jerk. He stole things from us.”

“Do you ever dream of him? Perhaps this theft you worry about was a symbolic one.”

“Could be. I seem to remember he stole Callie’s best symbolic china service and my symbolic guitar.”

“Your hostility aimed at me, a father figure, might be simply transferred from your rage toward your absent father.”

“My
what
?”

“The new lover…  yes, it could be the real feeling you were masking was resentment at him for possessing a penis.”

“I was a boy at the time.”

“Even more interesting. And since then you’ve gone so far as to have yourself castrated…  yes, yes, there is much here worth looking into.”

“How long do you think it will take?”

“I would anticipate excellent progress in…  three to five years.”

“Actually, no,” I said. “I don’t think I have
any
hope of curing you in that little time. So long, doc, it’s been great.”

“You still have ten minutes of your hour. I bill by the hour.”

“If you had any sense, you’d bill by the month. In advance.”

“Of course, that wasn’t the only reason I got the Change,” Cricket said. “I’d been thinking about it for a while, and I thought I might as well see what it’s like.”

I was clearing the table while he relaxed with a glass of wine—the Imbrium ’22, a good vintage, poured into a bottle labeled “Whiz-Bang Red” and smuggled past the anachronism checkers. It was a common practice in Texas, where everyone agreed authenticity could be carried too far.

“You mean this is your first time…  ?”

“I’m younger than you are,” he said. “You keep forgetting that.”

“You’re right. How’s it working out? Do you mind if I clean up?”

“Go ahead. I’m liking it all right. With a little practice, I might even get good at it. Still feels funny, though. I’d like to meet the guy that invented testicles. What a joker.”

“They do seem sort of like a preliminary design, don’t they?” I unfastened my skirt and folded it, then sat at the little table with the wavy mirror I used for dressing, make-up, and ablutions, and picked up my button hook. “Should I still be calling you Cricket? It’s not a real masculine name.”

He was watching me struggling to un-hook the buttons on my shoes, which was understandable, as it is an unlikely process to one raised in an environment of bare feet or slip-on footwear. Or at least I thought that was what he was watching.

Then I wondered if it was my knickers. They’re nothing special: cotton, baggy, with elastic at mid-calf. But they have cute little pink ribbons and bows. This raised an interesting possibility.

“I haven’t changed it,” he said. “But Lisa—Buster, dammit, wants me to.”

“Yeah? She could call you Jiminy.” I had unbuttoned my shirtwaist blouse and laid it on the skirt. I doffed the bloomers and was working on the buttons of the combinations—another loose cotton item fashion has happily forgotten—before I looked up and had to laugh at the expression on his face.

“I hit it, didn’t I?” I said.

“You did, but I won’t answer to it. I’m considering Jim, or maybe Jimmy, but…  what you said, that’s right out. What’s wrong with Cricket for a man, anyway?”

“Not a thing. I’ll continue to call you Cricket.” I stepped out of the combinations and tossed them aside.

“Jesus, Hildy!” Cricket exploded. “How long does it take you to get out of all that stuff?”

“Not nearly as long as it takes to put it on. I’m never quite sure I have it all in the right order.”

“That’s a corset, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.” Actually, he was almost right. We’d gotten down to the best items by now, no more cotton. The thing he was staring at could be bought—had been bought—in a specialty shop on the Leystrasse catering to people with a particular taste formerly common, now rare, and was
not
to be confused with the steel, whalebone, starch and canvas contraptions Victorian women tortured themselves with. It had elastic in it, and there the resemblance ended. It was pink and had frills around the edges and black laces in back. I pulled the pin holding my hair up, shook my head to let it fall. “Actually, you can help me with it. Could you loosen the laces for me?” I waited, then felt his hands fumbling with them.

“How do you handle
this
in the morning?” he griped.

“I have a girl come in.” But not really. What I did was run my finger down the pressure seams in front and
bingo
. So if removing it would have been as easy as that—and it would have been—why ask for help? You’re way ahead of me, aren’t you.

“I have to view this as pathology,” he said, sitting back down as I forced the still-tight garment down over my hips and added it to the pile. “How did you ever get into all this foolishness?”

I didn’t tell him, but it was one piece at a time. The Board didn’t care what you wore under your clothes as long as you looked authentic on the outside. But I’d grown interested in the question all women ask when they see the things their grandmothers wore: how the hell did they
do
it?

I don’t have a magic answer. I’ve never minded heat; I grew up in the Jurassic Era, Texas was a breeze compared to the weather brontos liked. The real corset, which I tried once, was too much. The rest wasn’t so bad, once you got used to it.

So how I did it was easy. As to why…  I don’t know. I liked the feeling of getting into all that stuff in the morning. It felt like becoming someone else, which seemed a good idea since the self I’d been lately kept doing foolish things.

“It makes it easier to write for my paper if I dress for the part,” I finally told him.

“Yeah, what about this?” he said, brandishing the copy of the
Texian
at me. He ran his finger down the columns. “ ‘Farm Report,’ in which I’m pleased to learn that Mr. Watkins’ brown mare foaled Tuesday last, mother and daughter doing fine. Imagine my relief. Or this, where you tell me the corn fields up by Lonesome Dove will be in real trouble if they don’t get some rain by next week. Did it slip your mind that the weather’s on a schedule in here?”

“I never read it. That would be cheating.”

“ ‘Cheating,’ she says. The only thing
in
here that sounds like you is this Gila Monster column, at least that gets nasty.”

“I’m tired of being nasty.”

“You’re in even worse shape than I thought.” He slapped the paper, frowning as if it were unclean. “ ’Church News.’
Church
news, Hildy?”

“I go to church every Sunday.”

He probably thought I meant the Baptist Church at the end of Congress. I did go there from time to time, usually in the evenings. The only thing Baptist about it was the sign out front. It was actually non-denominational, non-sectarian…  non-religious, to tell the truth. No sermons were preached but the singing was lots of fun.

Sunday mornings I went to real churches. It’s still the most popular sabbath, Jews and Muslims notwithstanding. I tried them out as well.

I tried
every
body out. Where possible I met with the clergy as well as attending a service, seeking theological explanations. Most were quite happy to talk to me. I interviewed preachers, presbyters, vicars, mullahs, rabbis, Lamas, primates, hierophants, pontiffs and matriarchs; sky pilots from every heavenly air force I could locate. If they didn’t have a formal top banana or teacher I spoke with the laity, the brethren, the monks. I swear, if three people ever got together to sing
hosannah
and rub blue mud on their bodies for the glory of
anything
, I rooted them out, ran them to ground, and shook them by the lapels until they told me their idea of the truth. Don’t tell me your
doubts
, lord love you, tell me something you
believe
in.
Glory
!

Surveys say sixty percent of Lunarians are atheist, agnostic, or just too damn stupid or lazy ever to have harbored an epistemological thought. You’d never know it by me. I began to think I was the only person in Luna who didn’t have an elaborate, internally-logical theology—always (at least so far) based on one or two premises that couldn’t be proven. Usually there was a book or body of writing or legends or myths that one could take whole, precluding the necessity of figuring it out for yourself. If that failed, there was always the route of a New Revelation, and there’d been a passel of them, both branching from established religions and springing full-blown from nothing but the mind of some wild-eyed fellow who’d Seen The Truth.

The drawback, for me, the common thread running through all of them, the magic word that changed an interesting story into the Will of God, was Faith. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not disparaging it. I tried to start with an open mind, no preconceptions. I was open to the lightning bolt, if it chose to strike me. I kept thinking that one day I’d look up and say
yes
! That’s
it
! But instead I just kept thinking, and quickly thought my way right out the door.

Of the forty percent who claim membership in an organized religion, the largest single group is the F.L.C.C.S. After that, Christians or Christian-descended faiths, everything from the Roman Catholics to groups numbering no more than a few dozen. There are appreciable minorities of Jews, Buddhists, Hindoos, Mormons, and Mahometans, some Sufis and Rosicrucians and all the sects and off-shoots of each. Then there were hundreds of really off-beat groups, such as the Barbie Colony out in Gagarin where they all have themselves altered to look exactly alike. There were people who worshipped the Invaders as gods, a proposition I wasn’t prepared to deny, but if so, so what? All they’d demonstrated toward us so far was indifference, and what’s the use of an indifferent god? How would a universe created by such a god be any different from one where there was no god, or where God was dead? There were people who believed that, too, that there
had
been a god but he came down with something and didn’t pull through. Or a group that left that group who thought God wasn’t dead, but in some heavenly intensive care unit.

There were even people who worshipped the CC as a god. So far I’d stayed away from them.

But my intention was to visit all the rest, if I lived that long. So far my wanderings had been mostly through various Christian sects, with every fourth Sunday devoted to what the listings called Religions, Misc. Some of these were about as misc. as a person could stand.

I had attended a Witches Black Mass, where we all took our clothes off and a goat was sacrificed and we were smeared with blood, which was even less fun than it sounds. I had sat in the cheap seats in Temple Levana Israel and listened to a guy reading in Hebrew, simultaneous translation provided for a small donation. I had sloshed down wine and eaten pale tasteless cookies which, I was informed, were the body and blood of Christ, and if they were, I figured I’d eaten him up to about the left knee. I could sing all the verses of Amazing Grace and most of Onward, Christian Soldiers. Nights, I read from various holy tracts; somewhere in there, I acquired a subscription to
The Watchtower
, I still don’t know how. I learned the glories of glossolalia, going jibber-jabber jibber-jabber right along with the rest of them, no simultaneous translation available at any price, no way to do it without feeling foolish.

These were only a few of my adventures; the list was long.

They could be best summarized in a visit I paid to one congregation where, midway through the festivities, I was handed a rattlesnake. Having no idea what I was supposed to do with the creature, I grabbed its head and milked it of its venom.
No, no, no
, they all cried. You’re supposed to handle it. What the fuck for? I cried back. Haven’t you
heard
? These suckers are
dangerous
. To which they had this to say:
God will protect you
.