Steel Beach (56 page)

I have a short list of things I never do, and right near the top is surrendering to emotional blackmail. If there’s a worse kind of sex than the charity fuck, I haven’t heard about it. And her words could be read as the worst kind of whipped-puppy appeal and dammit, okay, she
did
have a right to act like a whipped puppy but I
hate
whipped puppies, I want to
kick
them for letting themselves be whipped…  only the words didn’t come out like that, not out of that straight-backed, dry-eyed beanpole over there against the blazing sky. She’d grown since I met her, and I thought this was part of the growth. Why she’d picked me to unload on I don’t know, but the way she’d done it flattered me rather than obligated me.

So I told her no. Or would have, in a perfect world where I actually
follow
my short list of things I never do. What I did instead was get up and put my arms around her from behind and say:

“You handled that very well. If you’d cried, I’d have kicked your butt all the way to King City.”

“I won’t cry. Not about that, not anymore. And not when it’s over.”

And she didn’t.

Brenda had arranged for our moment of privacy by not telling me Cricket had been assigned to cover the festivities at Armstrong Park. After our little romantic interlude—quite pleasant, thanks for asking—she confessed her ruse, and also that he was going to play hooky after the first few hours and should be arriving any minute, so let’s get dressed, okay?

I can’t imagine why I worried about getting a head start on Liz. She got a head start on
all
of us, drinking on her way out to Armstrong and all the way back, as if Cricket needed any more causes for alarm.

She came barreling across the dunes in a fourwheel Aston Assbuster, model XJ, with a reaction engine and a bilious tangerine-flake paint job. This was the baby with four-point jets for boosting over those little potholes you sometimes find on Luna—say, something about the size of Copernicus. It couldn’t actually reach orbit, but it was a near thing. She had decorated it with her usual understated British good taste: holographic flames belching from the wheel wells, a whip antenna with a raccoon tail on the tip, a chrome-plated oversize skull sitting out front whose red eyes blinked to indicate turns.

This apparition came skidding around the
Heinlein
and headed straight for us. Brenda stood and waved her arms frantically and I had time to ponder how thin a soap bubble a Girl Scout tent really was before Liz hit the brakes and threw a spray of powdered green cheese against the tent wall.

She was out before the fuzzy dice stopped swinging, and ran around to the left side to unbelt Cricket, who’d strapped himself tight enough to risk gangrene of the pelvis. She picked him up and stuffed him in the airlock, where he seemed to come to his senses. He crawled inside the tent, but instead of standing he just hunkered there and I began to be concerned. I helped him off with his helmet.

“Cricket’s a little under the weather,” Liz said, over Cricket’s suit radio. “I thought I ought to get him inside quick.”

I realized he was saying something so I put my ear close to his lips and he was muttering
I think I’m gonna be okay
, over and over, like a mantra. Brenda and I got him seated, where he soon regained some color and a passing interest in his surroundings.

We were getting a little water into him when Liz came through the lock, pushing a Press-U-Kennel in front of her. At last Cricket came alive, springing to his feet and letting fly with an almost incoherent string of curses. No need to quote; Cricket wouldn’t be proud of it, he feels curses should be crafted rather than hurled, but he was too upset for that now.

“You
maniac
!” he shouted. “Why the hell wouldn’t you slow down?”

“’Cause you told me you were getting sick. I figured I better get you here quick as I could.”

“I was sick
because
you were going so fast!” But then the fight drained out of him and he sat down, shaking his head. “Fast? Did I say fast? We came all the way from Armstrong, and I think she touched ground four times.” He explored his head with his fingers. “No, five times, I count five lumps. She’d just look for a steep crater wall and say ‘Let’s see can we jump over this sucker,’ and the next thing I knew we’d be flying.”

“We were moving along,” Liz agreed. “I figure our shadow ought to be catching up with us about now.”

“ ‘Thank god for the gyros,’ I said. You remember I said that? And you said ‘What gyros? Gyros are for old ladies.’ ”

“I took ’em off,” Liz told us. “That way you get more practice using the steering jets. Come on, Cricket, you—”

“I’m going back with you guys,” Cricket said. “No way I’m ever riding with that crazy person again.”

“We only have two seats,” Brenda said.

“Strap me to the fender, I don’t care. It couldn’t be worse than what I just went through.”

“I think that calls for a drink,” Liz said.

“You think everything calls for a drink.”

“Doesn’t it?”

But before going out to bring in her portable bar she took the time to release her—what else?—English bulldog, Winston, from the kennel. He came lumbering out, revising all my previous notions of the definition of ugly, and promptly fell in love with me. More precisely, with my leg, which he started humping with canine abandon.

It could have spoiled the beginning of a wonderful relationship—I like a little more courtship, thank you—but luckily and against all odds he was well-trained, and a swift kick from Liz discouraged him short of consummation. After that he just followed me around, snuffling, mooning at me with his bloodshot, piggy eyes, going to sleep every time I sat down. I must admit, I took a shine to him. To prove it, I fed him all my leftover chicken bones.

Eighteen hours is a long time for a party, but there is a certain type of person with a perverse urge not to be the first to call it quits. All four of us were that type of person. We were going to stick it out, by god, right through to the playing of the Guatemalan National Anthem (“Guatemala, blest land, home of happy race,/ May thine altars profaned be never;/ No yoke of slavery weigh on thee ever/ Nor may tyrants e’er spit in thy face!”).

(Yes, I looked at the globe, too, and if you think the whole planet was going to stay up six hours for the national hymn of Tonga, you’re crazier than we were. Tonga got in her licks just after Western Samoa.)

No one was going to catch up with Liz, but we were soon matching her, and after a while Cricket even forgot he was mad at her. Things got a bit hazy as the celebration wore on. I can’t actually remember much after the Union Jack blazed in all its Britannic majesty. I remember that one mainly because Liz had been nodding out, and Brenda got me and Cricket to stand when “God Save the Queen” began to play, and we sang the second verse, which goes something like this:

O Lord our God arise,
Scatter her enemies,
And make them fall:
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix:
God save us all!

“God save us all, indeed,” Cricket said.

“That’s the most beautiful thing I ever heard,” Liz sobbed, with the easy tears of the veteran drunk. “And I think Winston needs to go wee-wee.”

The mutt did seem in some distress. Liz had given him a bowl or two of Guinness and I, after the chicken bones had no visible effect, had plied him with everything from whole jalapeños to the bottlecaps from Liz’s home brew. I’d seen Cricket slip him a few of the sausages we’d been roasting over the holographic campfire. All in all, this was a dog in a hurry. He was running in tight circles scratching at the airlock zipper.

Turned out the monster was perhaps
too
well trained. He flatly refused to do his business indoors, according to Liz, so we all set about stuffing him into his pressure suit.

Before long we were all reduced to hysterical laughter, the sort where you actually fall on the floor and roll around and start worrying about your own bladder. Winston
wanted
to cooperate, but as soon as we’d get his hind legs into the suit he’d start bouncing around in his eagerness and end up with the whole thing bunched around his neck. So Cricket scratched his back, which made the dog hold still and arch himself and lick his nose and we’d get his front legs in and maybe one of his back legs, and then he’d start that reflexive back leg jerking they do, and all was lost again. When we
did
get all four legs into the right holes he thought it was time, and we had to chase him and hold him down to get his air bottle strapped to his back, and at the last moment he took a dislike to his helmet and tried to eat it—this was a dog who made short work of steel bottlecaps, remember—and we had to put on a spare seal and test it before we finally screwed him in tight, shoved him in the lock, and cycled it.

Whereupon we laughed even harder at the spectacle of Winston running from rock to rock lifting a leg for a squirt here and a dribble there, blissfully unaware that it was all going into the waste pouch through the hose Liz had fastened to his doggie dingus with a rubber band. Yes, folks, I said doggie dingus: that’s the level of humor we’d been reduced to.

Later, I remember that Brenda and Liz were napping. I showed Cricket the wondrous curtain that turned the tent into two rooms. But he didn’t get it, and suggested we suit up and take a walk outside. I was game, though it probably wasn’t real wise considering I spent almost a minute trying to get my right foot into the left leg of my suit. But the things are practically foolproof. If Winston could handle one, I reasoned, how much trouble could I get into?

So who should come trotting up as soon as we emerged? I might have been in one sort of trouble right there, since he seemed to feel all bets were off now that Liz was sleeping, but after pressing his helmet to my leg and trying to sniff it and getting no results he sulked along behind us, probably wondering why everything out here smelled of plexi and dog slobber.

I really don’t want to sound too gay here, switching from that time with Brenda to the hijinx of the Queen and her Consort. But that’s the way it happened; you can’t arrange your life to provide a consistent dramatic line, like a film script. It had rocked me, and I had no notion of how to deal with it except to hold Brenda and hope that maybe she
would
cry. I still don’t.

My god. The horror that exists all around us, unnoticed.

I said something like that to her, with the half-formed feeling that maybe it would be good for her to approach it as a reporter.

“Did you ever wonder,” I said, “why we spend all our time looking into these trivial stories, when stories like that are waiting to be told?”

“Like what?” she said, drowsily. To be frank, it hadn’t been all
that
great for me, it never is with homosex, but she seemed to have enjoyed herself and that was the important part. You can always tell. Something glowed.

“Like what happened to
you
, dammit. Wouldn’t you think, in this day and age, that we’d have put that sort of…  of thing behind us?”

“I hate it when people say ‘in this day and age.’ What’s so special about it? As opposed to, for instance, the day and age of the Egyptians?”

“If you can name even one of the Pharaohs I’ll eat this tent.”

“You’re not going to make me mad, Hildy.” She touched my face, looked in my eyes, then nestled against my neck. “You don’t
need
to, don’t you see that? this is the first and last time we’ll ever be intimate. I know intimacy frightens you, but you don’t need—”

“It does not fr—”

“Besides, give me another, oh, eighty-three years and I’ll recite every Pharaoh from Akhenaton to Ramses.”

“Ouch.”

“It was in the program book. But this day and age is the only one I know right now, and I don’t know why you should think it’s any different from the day and age you grew up in. Were there child molesters back then?”

“You mean the early Neolithic? Yeah, there were.”

“And you thought the steady march of progress would eliminate them any day now.”

“It was a foolish thought. But it is a good story.”

“You’ve been away from the
Nipple
too long, jerk. It’s a
terrible
story. Who’d want to read a depressing story like that? I mean, that there’s still child molesters? Everybody knows that. That’s for sociologists, bless ’em. Now
one
story, one really gruesome one,
that’s
news. My story is just a stat in the Sunday Supplement grinder; you can put it on file and run it once a year, they’ll all have forgotten it by then.”

“You sound so much like me it’s scary.”

“You know it, babe. People read the
Nipple
to get a little spice in their lives. They want to be titillated. Angered. Horrified. They don’t want to be depressed. Walter’s always talking about The End Of The World, how we’d cover it. Hell, I’d put it on the back page. It’s
depressing
.”

“You amaze me.”

“I’ll tell you what. I know more movie stars than everybody else in my school put together.
They
call
me
, the minor ones, anyway. I
love
my work. So don’t tell me about the important stories we ought to be covering.”

“That’s why you got in the business? To meet celebrities?”

“Why did you get in the business?”

I didn’t answer her then, but some vestigial concept of truth in media forces me to say that hob-nobbing with the glittering people may have had something to do with it.

But it really was amazing the changes a year had wrought in my little Brenda. I didn’t think I liked it. Not that it was any of my business, but that’s never stopped me in the past. At first I blamed the news racket itself, but thinking about it a bit more I wondered if maybe that injured little girl, that oh-so-
good
little girl who’d had herself sewed up rather than do what the nice lady suggested and turn daddy in to the bad people…  I wondered if she might actually teach cynical old Hildy a thing or two about the bad old world and how to get by in it.

“I’m sorry about not bringing Buster.”