Steel Beach (57 page)

“Huh? What’s that?”

“Luna to Hildy, come in Hildy, over.”

“Sorry, my mind was wandering.” It was Cricket, and we were walking together on the surface. I even remembered going through the lock.

“I know I said I’d bring her so you could meet her, but she put up a big fuss because she wanted to go with some friends to Armstrong, so I let her.”

Something in his voice made me suspect he wasn’t telling the whole truth. I thought maybe he hadn’t argued as hard as he might have. The only thing I really knew about his daughter was that he was very protective of her. I’d learned, through a little snooping, that none of his coworkers at the
Shit
had ever met her; he kept work and family strictly segregated.

Which is not unusual in Lunar society, we’re very protective of the little privacy we have. But we’d known each other as man and woman for not even a week at that point, and already there had been a series of these signs that he…  how should I put it?…  was reluctant to let me deeper into his life. To put it another way, I’d been tentatively plucking at the daisy of devotion, and most of the petals were coming up
he loves me not
.

To be fair, I was unused to being in love. I was out of practice at doing it, had never been adept at it, was wondering if I’d forgotten how to go about it. The last time I had really
fallen
, as they say, had been a teen-age crush, and I’d assumed lo these eighty years that it was an affliction visited solely on the young. So it could be that I wasn’t communicating to him the tragic, hopeless
depth
of my longing. Maybe I wasn’t sending out the right signals. He could be thinking, this is just old Hildy. Lot’s o’ laffs. This is probably just the way she
is
when she’s female, all gooey and cow-eyed and anxious to bring me a hot cup of coffee in the morning and cuddle.

And to be brutal…  maybe I wasn’t in love. It didn’t feel like that distant adolescent emotion, but hardly anything did; I wasn’t that person any more. This felt more solid, less painful. Not so hopeless, even if he
did
come right out and say he loved me not. Does this mean it wasn’t love? No, it meant I’d keep working at it. It meant I wouldn’t want to run out and kill myself…  bite your tongue, you stupid bitch.

So was this the real turtle soup, or merely the mock? Or was it, at long last, love? Provisional verdict: it would do till something better came along.

“Hildy, I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”

That sound is all my fine rationalizations crashing down around my ears. The other sound is of a knife being driven into my heart. The scream hasn’t arrived yet, but it will, it will.

“Why do you say that?” I thought I did a good job of keeping the anguish out of my voice.

“Correct me if I’m wrong. I get the feeling that you have…  some deeper than usual feelings about me since…  since that night.”

“Correct you? I love you, you asshole.”

“Only you could have put it so well. I like you, Hildy; always have. I even like the knives you keep leaving in my back, I can’t imagine why. I might grow to love you, but I have some problems with that, a situation I’m a long ways from being over yet—”

“Cricket, you don’t have to worry—”

“—and we won’t get into it. That’s not the main reason I want to break this off before it gets serious.”

“It’s
already
—”

“I know, and I’m sorry.” He sighed, and we both watched Winston go haring off after some vacuum-loving bunny rabbit of his own imagination, somewhere in the vicinity of the
Heinlein
. Only the top part of the immense ship was in sunlight now. Sunset at Delambre came later than at Armstrong. There was still enough light reflected from the upper hull for us to see clearly, not the blazing brightness of full day, though.

“Cricket…  ”

“There’s no sense hiding it, I guess,” he said. “I lied to you. Buster wanted to come, she’d like to meet you, she thinks my stories about you are funny. But I don’t want her to meet you. I know I’m protective of her, but it’s just my way; I don’t want her to have a childhood like mine, and we won’t go into
that
, either. The thing is, you’re going through something weird, you must be or you wouldn’t be living in Texas. I don’t know what it is, don’t
want
to know, at least not right now. But I don’t want it to rub off on Buster.”

“Is that all? Hell, man, I’ll move tomorrow. I may have to keep teaching for a few weeks till they can get a new—”

“It wouldn’t do any good, because that’s not all.”

“Oh, goody, let’s hear more of the things wrong with me.”

“No jokes, for once, Hildy. There’s something else that’s bothering you. Maybe it’s tied up with your quitting the pad and moving to Texas, maybe it isn’t. But I sense something, and it’s very ugly. I don’t want to know what it is…  I would, I promise you, if not for my child. I’d hear you out, and I’d try to help. But I want you to look me in the eye and tell me I’m wrong.”

When a full minute had gone by and no eye contact had been made, no denials uttered, he sighed again, and put his hand on my shoulder.

“Whatever it is, I don’t want her to get mixed up in it.”

“I see. I think.”

“I don’t think you do, since you’ve never had a child. But I promised myself I’d put my own life on hold until she was grown. I’ve missed two promotions because of that, and I don’t care. This hurts more than that, because I think we could have been good for each other.” He touched the bottom of my faceplate since he couldn’t reach in and lift my chin, and I looked up at him. “Maybe we still could be, in ten years or so.”

“If I live that long.”

“It’s that bad?”

“It could be.”

“Hildy, I feel—”

“Just go away, would you? I’d like to be alone.”

He nodded, and left.

I wandered for a while, never getting out of sight of the bubble of light that was the tent, listening to Winston barking over the radio. Why would you put a radio in a dog’s suit? Well, why not.

That was the kind of deep question I was asking myself. I couldn’t seem to turn my mind to anything more important.

I’m not good at describing the painful feelings. It could be that I’m not good at feeling them. Did I feel a sense of emptiness? Yes, but not as awful as I might have expected. For one thing, I hadn’t loved him long enough for the loss to leave that big a cavity. But more important, I hadn’t given up. I don’t think you can, not that easily. I knew I’d call on him again, and hell, I’d beg, and I might even cry. Such things have been known to work, and Cricket does have a heart in there somewhere, just like me.

So I was depressed, no question. Despondent? Not really. I was
miles
from suicidal,
miles
. Miles and miles and miles.

That was when I first noticed a low-grade headache. All those nanobots in that cranium, you’d think they’d have licked the common headache by now. The migraine has gone the way of the dodo, true, but those annoying little throbbing ones in the temple or forehead seem beyond the purview of medicine, most likely because we inflict them on ourselves; we
want
them, on some level.

But this one was different. Examining it, I realized it was centered in the eyes, and the reason was something had been monkeying with my vision for quite some time. Peripherally, I’d been seeing something, or rather
not
seeing something, and it was driving me crazy. I stopped my pacing and looked around. Several times I thought I was on the track of something, but it always flickered away. Maybe it was Brenda’s ghosts. I was practically touching the hull of the famous Haunted Ship; what else could it be?

Winston came bounding along, leaping into the air, just as if he was chasing something. And at last I saw it, and smiled because it was so simple. The stupid dog was just chasing a butterfly. That’s probably what I’d seen, out of the corner of my eye. A butterfly.

I turned and started back to the tent (the
dog
), thinking I’d have a drink or two or three (was
chasing
) or, hell, maybe get really blotto, I think I had a good excuse

a butterfly

and I turned around again but I couldn’t find the insect, which made perfect sense because we weren’t in Texas, we were in Delambre and there’s no fucking
air
out here, Winston, and I’d about dismissed it as a drunken whimsy when a naked girl materialized out of
very
thin air and ran seven steps—I can see them now, in my mind’s eye, clear as anything, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and then gone again back to where ghosts go, and she’d come close enough to me to almost touch her.

I’m a reporter. I chase the news. I chased her, after an indeterminate time when I was as capable of movement as any statue in the park. I didn’t find her; the only reason I’d seen her at all was the very last rays of the sun reflected from far overhead, not much more light than a good candle would give. I didn’t find the butterfly, either.

I realized the dog was nudging my leg. I saw a red light was blinking inside his suit, which meant he had ten minutes of air left, and he’d been trained to go home when he saw the light. I reached down and patted his helmet, which did him no good but he seemed to appreciate the thought, licking his chops. I straightened and took one last look around.

“Winston,” I said. “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

Ezekiel saw the wheel. Moses saw the burning bush. Joe Smith saw the Angel Moroni, and every electro-preacher since Billy Sunday saw a chance at good ratings in prime time and more money than he could lift.

Hayseed farmers, asteroid miners and chronic drug abusers have seen Unidentified Flying Objects and little guys who want to see our leaders. Drunks see pink elephants and brontosaurs and bugs crawling all over everything. The Buddha saw enlightenment and Mohammed must have seen something, though I was never clear just what it was. Dying people see a long tunnel full of light with all the people they hated while they were alive standing at the end of it. The Founding Flack knew a good thing when he saw it. Christians are looking to see Jesus, Walter is looking for a good story, and a gambler is looking for that fourth ace to turn up; sometimes they see these things.

People have been seeing things like that since the first caveman noticed dark shadows stirring out there beyond the light of the campfire, but until the day of the Bicentennial Hildy Johnson had never seen anything.

Give me a sign, O Lord, she had been crying, that I might know Thy shape. And behold, the Lord sent unto her a sign.

A butterfly.

It was a Monarch butterfly, quite lovely in its orange and black, quite ordinary at first glance, except for its location. But upon closer examination I found something on its back, about the size of a gelatin capsule, that looked for all the world like an air tank.

Yes, dear ones,
never
throw anything away. You don’t know when you might need it. I’d had no use for my optic holocam for quite a while, since the
Texian
isn’t equipped to print pictures. But Walter had never asked me to give it back and I’d not gone to the bother of having it removed, so it was still there in my left eye, recording everything I saw, faithfully storing it all until capacity was exhausted, then wiping it to make way for the new stuff. Many a wild-eyed prophet before me would have killed to have a holocam, so he could
prove
to those doubting bastards he’d really
seen
those green cocker spaniels get out of the whistling gizmo that landed on the henhouse.

Considering the number of cameras made between the Brownie and the end of the twentieth century, you’d think more intriguing pictures would have been taken of paranormal events, but look for them—I did—and you’ll come up with a bucket of space. After that, of course, computers got so good that
any
picture could be faked.

But the only person I had to convince was myself. The first thing I did, back in the tent, was to secure the data into permanent storage. The second thing I did was to not tell anybody what I’d seen. Part of that was reporter’s instinct: you don’t blab until the story’s nailed down. The rest was admission of the weaknesses flesh is heir to: I hadn’t been the soberest of witnesses. But more importantly…  this was
my
vision. It had been granted to
me
. Not to Cricket, that ingrate, who’d have seen it if he’d said he loved me and thrown his arms around me and told me what a knuckle-headed dope he’d been. Not to Miss Pulitzer Prize Brenda (you think that, just because I gave her the big story, I wasn’t jealous? You poor fool, you). Just me.

And Winston. How could I have thought that gorgeous hound was ugly? The third thing I did back in the tent was give that most sublime quadruped a pound of my best sausage, and apologize for not having anything better—like a Pomeranian, or a Siamese.

We’re not talking about the butterfly now. That was amazing, but a few wonders short of a nonesuch.

It was an air tank on the insect’s back. With suitable enlargement I could make out tiny lines going from it to the wings. The images got fuzzy when I tried to find out where they went. But I could guess: since there was no air for it to fly in, and since it seemed to be flying, I deduced it was kept aloft by reaction power, air squirting from the underside of its wings. Comparing this specimen to one mounted in a museum I noted differences in the carapace. A vacuum-proof shell? Probably. The air tank could dribble oxygen into the butterfly’s blood.

None of the equipment I could identify was what you’d call off-the-shelf, but so what? Nanobots can build the most cunning, tiny machines,
much
smaller than the air tank and regulator and (possibly) gyro I saw. As for the carapace, that shouldn’t be too hard to effect with genetic engineering. So somebody was building bugs to live on the surface. So what? All that implied was an eccentric tinkerer, and Luna is lousy with them. And that’s just the sort of hare-brained thing they build.

All this research was being done in bed, in Texas.

On my way home from the celebration I’d stopped at a store and bought a disposable computer, television, recorder, and flashlight and put them in my pocket and smuggled them past temporal customs. Easy. Everybody does it, with small items, and the guards don’t even have to be bribed. I waited till nightfall, then got in bed and pulled the covers over my head, turned on the light, unrolled the television, dumped the holocam footage into the recorder and wiped all traces of it from my cerebral banks. Then I started scanning the footage frame by frame.