Steel Beach (58 page)

Why all the secrecy? I honestly couldn’t have told you at the time. I knew I didn’t want the CC to see this material but don’t know why I felt it was so important. Instinct, I guess. And I couldn’t have guaranteed even these measures would keep him from finding out, but it was the best I could do. Using a throwaway number cruncher instead of hooking in to the mainframe seemed a reasonable way to keep the data away from him, so long as I didn’t ever network it with any other system. He’s good, but he’s not magic.

It was an hour’s work to deal with the butterfly and file it under Wonderments, Lepidopterous. Then I moved on to the miracle.

Height
: Five foot two.
Eyes
: of blue.
Hair
: blonde, almost white, shoulder-length, straight.
Complexion
: light brown, probably from tanning.
Apparent age
: ten or eleven (no pubic hair or bust, two prominent front teeth, facial clues).
Distinguishing marks
: none.
Build
: slender.
Clothing
: none.

She could have been much older; a small minority prefer to Peter Pan it through life, never maturing. But I doubted it, from the way she moved. The teeth were a clue, as well. I pegged her for a natural, not modified, she just grew that way.

She was visible for 11.4 seconds, not running hard, not bouncing too high with each step. She seemed to come out of a black hole and fall back into one. I was being methodical about this, so I got everything I could out of those 11.4 seconds before moving on to the frames I was dying to examine: the first one, and the last one.

Item
: If she was a ghost, then ghosts have mass. I’d been unable to find her footprints among the thousands of others there on the crater rim (I had noted a lot of the prints had toes, but it meant nothing; lots of kids wear boots that leave prints like bare feet), but the film clearly showed the prints being made, the dust being kicked up. The computer studied the prints and concluded the girl massed about what you’d expect.

Item
: She was not
completely
naked. In a few frames I could see biomagnetic thermosoles on the bottoms of her feet, a damn good idea if you’re going to run over the blazing rocks of the surface. There was also a bit of jewelry sticking to her chest, a few inches above the left nipple. It was brass-colored, and shaped more like a pressure fitting than anything else I could think of.
Conjecture
: Maybe it
was
a pressure fitting. The snap-on type, universally used to connect air hoses to tanks.

Item
: In some of the early frames a slight mist could be seen in front of her face. It looked like moisture freezing, as if she had exhaled. There was no sign of respiration after that.

Item
: She was aware of my presence. Between step four and step five she turned her head and looked directly at me for half a second. She smiled. Then she made a goofy face and crossed her eyes.

I made a few more observations, none of them seeming very relevant or shedding any real light on the mystery. Oh, yes:
Item
: I liked her. Making that face was just the sort of thing I would have done at her age. At first I thought she was taunting me, but I watched it over and over and concluded she was
daring
me.
Catch me if you can, old lady
. Doll-face, I plan to.

Then I spent most of the rest of the night analyzing just a few seconds of images before and after her appearance. When I was done I wiped the data from the computer, and for good measure, put it in with the glowing embers of the fire in my kitchen stove. It crackled and popped nicely. Now the only record of my experience was in the little recorder.

I slept with it under my pillow.

Next Friday, after putting the
Texian
to bed, I went back to Hamilton’s and purchased a two-man tent. If that puzzles you, you’ve never tried to live in a one-man tent. I had it delivered to the rover rental office nearest the old mining road, where I leased a vehicle from their second-hand fleet, paying two months in advance to get the best rate. I had it tanked full of oxygen and checked the battery level and kicked the tires and had them replace a sagging leaf spring, and set off for Delambre.

I set up the tent in the exact spot where we’d been seven days before. Sunday night I struck the tent, having seen nothing at all, and drove back to park the rover in a rented garage.

The Friday after that, I did the same thing.

I spent all my weekends out at Delambre for quite a long time. It was enough that, soon, I had to trade in my nice new suit for a maternity model. If you’ve never worn one of those, don’t even ask. But nothing was going to keep me away from Delambre, not even a developing pregnancy.

It all made sense to me at the time. Looking back, I can see some questions about my behavior, but I think I’d still do it again. But let’s try to answer a few of them shall we?

I only spent the weekends at the crater because I still needed Texas to give my life some stability. I still would have kept coming back until the end of the school term because I felt I had a responsibility to those who hired me, and to the children. But the question didn’t arise, because I needed the job more than it needed me. Each Sunday evening I found myself longing for my cabin. I guess a true Visionary would have been ashamed of me; you’re supposed to drop everything and pursue the Vision.

I did the best I could. Every Friday I couldn’t get out of the disney fast enough. I attended no more churches, unburdened my soul to no more quacks.

It’s a little harder explaining the pregnancy. A little embarrassing, too. As part of my efforts to experience as much as possible of what life had been like on Old Earth, I had had my menstrual cycle restored. I know it sounds crazy. I’d expected it would be a one-time thing, like the corset, but found it not nearly as onerous as Callie had cracked it up to be. I hadn’t intended to let it go on forever, I wasn’t that silly, but I thought, I don’t know, half a dozen periods or so, then over and out. The rest is really no mystery at all. It’s just what happens to fertile nulliparous centenarians who know zip about Victorian methods of birth control, and who are so un-wise as to couple with a guy who swears he’s not going to come.

The real mystery came
after
the rabbit died (I boned up on the terminology after I got the news). Why keep it?

The best I can say is that I’d never ruled out child-bearing as something I might do, some day, some
distant
day when I had twenty years to spare. Naturally, that day never seemed to dawn. Having a baby is probably something you have to
want
to do, badly, with an almost instinctual urge that seems to reside in some women and not in others. Looking around me, I had noted there were plenty of women who had this urge. Boy, did they have the urge. I’d never felt it. The species seemed in fine shape in the hands of these breeder women, and I’d never flattered myself that I’d be any good at it, so it was always a matter of someday.

But enough unsuccessful and unplanned and un-
understood
suicide attempts focuses the mind wonderfully. I realized that if I didn’t do it now, I might never do it. And it was the one major human experience I could think of that I might want to have and had not had. And, as I said, I’d been looking for a sign, O Lord, and this seemed like one. A bolt from the blue, not on the order of the Girl and Butterfly, but a portent all the same.

Which simply meant that every Friday on my way to Delambre I gave serious thought to stopping off and having the damn thing taken care of, and every time, so far, had elected to keep it, not exactly by a landslide.

There’s an old wives’ tale that a pregnant woman should not visit the surface. If that’s true, why do they make maternity suits? The only danger is of coming into labor while in the suit, and that’s not much of a danger. An ambulance can get you from any point on Luna to a birthing center in twenty minutes. That was not a concern to me. Nor was I neglecting my duties as an incubator. I got roaring drunk that once, but that’s easily cured. Each Wednesday I visited a check-up center and was told things were cooking nicely. Each Thursday I dropped by Ned Pepper’s office and, if he was sober enough, let him poke me and thump me and pronounce me as fine a heifer as he’d ever come across, and sell me a bottle of yellow elixir which did wonders for my struggling rose bushes.

If I kept it to term, I intended to bear it naturally. (It was a male, but it seems silly to think of an embryo as having a sex.) When I was about twenty it seemed for a while that birthing was soon to be a thing of the past. The large majority of women were rearing their pups in jars, often prominently displayed on the living room coffee table. I watched many a neighbor’s blastocyst mature over the years, peering into the scope with all the enthusiasm one usually brings to viewing Uncle Luigi’s holos of his trip to Mars. I watched many a mother scratching the bottle and cooing and goo-gooing to her second-trimester fetus. I was present at a few decantings, which were often elaborately catered, with hired bands and wrapped presents and the whole
megillah
.

As is so often the case, it was a fad, not a tide of civilization. Some studies came out suggesting that Screwtops did less well in later life than Bellybusters. Other studies showed the opposite. Studies frequently do that.

I don’t read studies. I go with my gut. The pendulum had swung back toward the “healthy mother/child bonding of vaginal delivery” and against the “birth trauma scars a child for life” folks, but my gut told me that, given that I should do this at all, my gut was the proper place for it to grow. And now that my uterus has been heard from, I will thank it to shut up.

The frames recording the girl’s appearance and subsequent seeming exit from this dimensional plane revealed several interesting things. She had not materialized out of thin vacuum nor had she fallen out of and back into a black hole. There were images before, and after.

I couldn’t make a thing of them, given the low light and the mysterious nature of the transubstantiation. But that’s what computers are for. My five-and-dime model chewed on the images of twisted light for a while, and came up with the notion that a human body, wrapped in a perfect flexible mirror, would twist light in just such a way. All you’d see would be distorted reflections of the person’s surroundings, so while not rendering one invisible, it sure would make you hard to see. Up close it would be possible to make out a human shape, if you were looking for it. From a distance, forget it. If she stood still, especially against a background as shattered as the Delambre junkyard, there would be no way to find her. I remembered the nagging headache I’d had shortly before her little show. She’d been around before she decided to reveal herself to me.

A search of the library found no technology that could produce anything like what I had observed. Whatever it was, it could be turned off and on very quickly; my holocam’s shutter speed was well below a thousandth of a second, and she was wrapped in the mirror in one frame, naked in the next. She didn’t
take
it off, she
turned
it off.

Looking for an explanation of the other singular thing about her, the ability to run nude, even if for only seven steps, in a vacuum, produced a few tidbits concerning the implantation of oxygen sources to dispense directly into the bloodstream, research that had never borne profitable fruit and had been abandoned as impractical. Hmmmm.

I put myself through a refresher course in vacuum survival. People have lived after exposure of up to four minutes, which is when the brain starts to die. They suffer significant tissue damage, but so what? Infants have lived after even longer periods. You can do useful work for maybe a minute, maybe a bit longer, work like scrambling into an emergency suit. Exposures of five to ten seconds will likely rupture your eardrums and certainly hurt like hell, but do you no other real harm. “The bends” is easily treatable.

So wait a minute, what’s all this talk about a miracle? I determined in fairly short order that what I’d seen was almost surely a technical marvel, not a supernatural one. And I was a bit relieved, frankly. Gods are capricious characters, and the biggest part of me had no desire to have it proved that one really existed. What if you saw your burning bush and it turned out the Power behind it was a psychopathic child, like the Christian God? He’s God, right? He’s proved it and you’ve got to do what he tells you to do. So what if he asks you to sacrifice your son on an altar to His massive ego, or build a big boat in your back yard, or pimp your wife to the local honcho, blackmail him, and give him a dose of clap? (Don’t believe me? Genesis 12: 10-20. You learn the most interesting things in church.)

It didn’t diminish the miracle one bit to know it was probably man-made. It excited me all the more. Somewhere out there, in that huge junkyard, somebody was doing things nobody else knew how to do. And if it wasn’t in the library, the CC probably didn’t know about it, either. Or if he did, he was suppressing it, and if so, why?

All I knew was I wanted to talk to whoever had made it possible for that little girl to wrap herself in a perfect mirror and make a face at me.

Which was easier said than done.

The first four weekends I simply camped out, did very little exploring. I was hoping, since she’d come to me once, she’d do it again. No real reason why she should, but again, why not?

After that I spent more time in my suit. I climbed a few alps of rubble, but there didn’t seem much point in it after the first few. It stretched as far as the eye could see; there was no way to search it, or even a small part of it.

No, it seemed to me it was no coincidence the sighting had come at the base of that monument to high hopes, the Starship
Robert A. Heinlein
. I set about to explore as much of the old hulk as I could, but first I visited the library again and learned something of his history. Herewith, in brief, is the saga of failed dreams:

The
Heinlein
was first proposed in 2010, by a group known as the L5 Society. It was to be humanity’s first interstellar vessel, a remarkable idea when you consider that the Lunar colony at the time was quite small, still struggling year to year for funding. And it was to be another twenty years before the keel was laid, at L5, one of the Trojan libration points of the Earth/Luna system. L5 and L4 enjoyed several decades of prominence before the Invasion, and thrived for almost forty years afterwards. Today they are orbiting junkyards. Economic reasons again.