Steel Beach (63 page)

But the real source of my nervousness was just as silly as a plate of pickles and ice cream. Since I was still living in Texas and commuting to Delambre, I had also been seeing Ned Pepper once a week, too. Ostensibly it was to keep him and others from getting suspicious, but I’m pretty sure it was also because I found him oddly reassuring. The thing is, while no one held any brief for his medical knowledge or skills, most people felt he was a damn good intuitive diagnostician. Had he been born in a simpler era he might have made quite a name for himself. And…  

“Hildy,” he told me, tapping his stethoscope against his lip, “I don’t want to alarm you, but something about this pregnancy makes me nervous as a jacked-off polecat.” He took another pull on his bottle and staggered to his feet as I settled my skirt back around my legs. That’s the only reason I’d been able to go to him and not the King City sawbones; a West Texas gynecological exam barely disarranged your clothing. The Doctor would poke his cold metal heartbeat disc under my shirt and listen to my heart and the fetal one, thump my back and my belly, take my body temperature with a glass thermometer, then ask me to swing my feet up into these here stirrups, my dear. I knew he had a shiny brass speculum he was dying to try out but I drew the line at that. Just let him look and play doctor and we’d both go home happy. So what was this
nervous
shit? He didn’t have any right to be nervous. He sure didn’t have the right to tell me about it. He seemed to realize that as soon as the slug of redeye hit his belly.

“I assume you’re getting real medical care?” he asked, sheepishly. When I told him I was, he nodded, and snapped his suspenders. “Well, then. Don’t fret yourself none. He’ll probably come out a ridin’ a wild bronc and dealin’ five-card stud. Just like his mama.”

Naturally, I did worry. Pregnancy is insanity, take it from me.

When I was sure my nausea had passed I stood up and saw I’d been sitting on the hen coop. It had a steel framework but my weight had loosened a lot of the fake wooden shingles glued to the sides. A rooster about the size of a mouse was protesting this outrage by pecking at my toes. Inside, several dozen hens were…  well, egging him on. Sorry.

The colt wouldn’t be standing on his own for a little while yet, but the show was basically over. Hansel and Gretel and Libby moved off to other pursuits. I stayed a little longer, empathizing with the mare, who looked up at me as if to say You’ll get your turn soon enough, Miss Smarty. I reached in and stroked the new-born with my fingertip, and the mother tried to bite my hand. I didn’t blame her. I got up, dusted my knees, and headed over to the farmhouse.

I knew the house lid was hinged; I’d seen the kids lift it up. But I was still ambivalent enough about these pets that I didn’t want to do that. Instead I bent over and pushed the little doorbell. In a moment one of the male kewpies came out and looked up expectantly, hoping for a treat.

If the horselets and mini-kine and dwarfowl were cherry bombs in a scale of illegal explosiveness, then the kewpies were ten sticks of dynamite. Kewpies were little people, no more than twenty centimeters tall.

The children had named them well. These are not adult human beings, done to scale. In an effort to make them smarter, Libby had given them bigger brains, and thus bigger heads. Perfectly sane reasoning, for a child. It might even be right, for all I knew about it. But though he assured me the current generation was much more clever than the two preceding ones, they were no more intelligent than any of several species of monkey.

They were
not
human, let’s get that out of the way right now. But they contained human genes, and that is strictly forbidden on Luna under laws over two centuries old. I didn’t have any of these creepy little baby dolls to ride my little horselet when I was a nipper. I don’t think anybody did. No, these were the result of Libby’s enquiring young mind, and no one else’s.

If you could get over the shock and horror almost every Lunarian would feel at first sight of the things, they were actually quite cute. They smiled a lot, and were eager to grasp your finger in their tiny little hands. Most of them could say a word or two, things like “candy!” and “Hi!” A few formed rudimentary sentences. Possibly they could have been trained to do more, but the children didn’t take the time. In spite of their hands they were not tool users. They were
not
little people. And they
were
cute.

Enough of that. The fact is they made my skin crawl on some very primitive level. They were bad juju. They were the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Science. They were faerie sprites, and thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

So the real truth is I couldn’t make up my mind about the damn things. On the one hand, what had attracted me to the Heinleiners was the fact that they were doing things no one else was doing. So…  all reasonable and logical rationalizations aside…  why did they have to do
that
?

While I was still pondering this question, not for the first time, someone came up beside me and lifted the lid of the farm house. I looked in with him, and we both frowned. The inside of the structure was furnished with little chairs and beds, the former tumbled over and the latter not occupied. Half a dozen kewpies were curled up here and there, sleeping where the urge had taken them, and there were piles of what you’d expect from animals where that urge had taken them. It went a long way toward helping me believe they weren’t little people. It also recalled documentary horror films from the twentieth century of homes for the insane and the retarded.

The man let the lid drop, looked around, and bellowed for his children, who came running from where they had been racing model cars, guilty looks on their faces. He glowered down at them.

“I told you that if you can’t keep your pets clean, you can’t have them,” he said.

“We were gonna clean them up, Dad,” Hansel said. “Soon as we finished the race. Isn’t that right, Hildy?”

The little bastard. Fearing that my sufferance here was still very much dependent on these precocious brats, I said, diplomatically I hope, “I’m sure they would have.”

And I said that because I wasn’t about to lie to the man standing beside me, father to Hansel and Gretel, and the man on whose good graces my continued presence among the Heinleiners
really
relied.

This is the man the media has always referred to as “Merlin,” since he would never reveal his real name. I’m not even sure if
I
know his real name, and I think he trusts me by now, as much as he ever will. But I don’t like the name of Merlin, so in this account I will refer to him as Mister Smith. Valentine Michael Smith.

Mister V. M. Smith, leader of the Heinleiners, was a tall man, ruggedly handsome in the mold of some of our more virile movie stars, with white, even teeth that flashed with little points of light when he smiled and blue eyes that twinkled with wisdom and compassion.

Did I say he was tall? Actually, he was a little shrimp of a guy. Or, come to think of it, I’d say he was of medium height. And by golly, maybe his hair was black and curly.
Ugly
he was, with a snaggled-toothed smile like a dead pig in the sunshine. Hell, maybe he was bald.

When you get right down to it, I’m not even going to swear he was male. I think the heat is largely off of him by now, but he (or she) thinks differently, so there will not even be a description of him from me. My portraits of the other Heinleiners, children included, are deliberately vague and quite possibly misleading. To picture him, do what I do when reading a novel: just pick a famous face you like and pretend he looks like that. Or make your own composite. Try a young Einstein, with unruly hair and a surprised expression. You’ll be wrong, although I
will
swear there was a look in his eyes as if the universe was a much stranger place than he’d ever imagined.

And that business about leading the Heinleiners…  if they had a leader, he was it. It was Smith who had made their isolated way of life possible with his researches into forgotten sciences. But the Heinleiners were an independent bunch. They didn’t go in for town meetings, were unlikely to be found on the rosters of service clubs—didn’t really hold much of a brief for democracy, when you get right down to it. Democracy, one of them said to me once, means you get to do whatever the majority of silly sons of bitches says you have to do. Which is not to say they favored dictatorship (“getting to do what
one
silly son of a bitch says you have to do.”
op. cit.
). No, what they liked (if I may quote one more time from my Heinleiner philosopher) was forgetting about
all
the silly sons of bitches and doing what they damn well pleased.

This is a hazardous way of life in a totally urbanized society, apt to land you in jail—where an embarrassing number of Heinleiners
did
live. To live like that you need elbow room. You need Texas, and I mean the
real
Texas, before the arrival of the iron horse, before the Mexicans, before the Spaniards. Hell, maybe before the
Indians
. You needed the Dark Continent, the headwaters of the Amazon, the South Pole, the sound barrier, Everest, the Seven Lost Cities. Wild places, unexplored places,
not
good old stodgy old Luna. You needed elbow room and adventure.

A lot of Heinleiners had lived in disneys, some still did as at least a better alternative to the anthill cities. But it didn’t take long to discover what toy frontiers they actually were. The asteroid belt and the outer planets had high concentrations of these crotchety malcontents, too, but it had been a long time since either place had been a real challenge to humanity. A lot of ship’s captains were Heinleiners, a lot of solitary miners. None of them were happy—possibly that type of person can never be happy—but at least they were away from the masses of humanity and less likely to get into trouble if offered an intolerable insult—like bad breath, or inappropriate laughter.

That’s unfair. While there were quite a number of antisocial hotheads among them, most had learned to socialize with the group, swallow the unpleasantness of daily life, put up with the thousand small things we each endure every day. It’s called civilization. It’s making your needs, your dreams, subservient to the greater good, and we all do it. Some of us do it so well we forget we ever
had
dreams of adventure. The Heinleiners did it badly; they still remembered. They still dreamed.

Those dreams and five cents will get you a cup of coffee anywhere in Luna. The Heinleiners realized that, until Mister Smith came along and made them think fairy tales
can
come true, if you wish upon a star.

I followed Smith out of the farm, where he’d left his children and Libby hard at work cleaning out the kewpies’ house. We were in one of the long corridors of the
R. A. Heinlein
, some of which, like this one, were coated with the silvery null-field. I was about to go after him when I remembered Winston. I stuck my head back into the room, snagged his helmet, and whistled, and he came lumbering out from beneath the tables. He was licking his chops and I thought I saw traces of blood around his mouth.

“Have you been eating horses again?” I asked him. He merely gazed up and licked his nose. He knew he wasn’t supposed to get up on the tables, but there were always some horselets that had foolishly jumped off and he felt they were fair game. I didn’t know what the kids thought of his hunting, since I didn’t know if they were aware of it; I hadn’t told them. But I know Winston was getting a taste for horsemeat.

I’d thought I’d have to hurry to catch up with Smith, but when I looked up I saw he’d paused a little way down the corridor and was waiting for me.

“So you’re still around, eh?” he said. Yessir, my reputation in the old
R.A.H.
couldn’t have been higher.

“I guess it’s because I just love children.”

He laughed at that. I’d only met him three times before and not talked to him very long on any of those occasions, but he was one of those people good at sizing others up on short acquaintance. Most of us think we are, but he
was
.

“I know they’re not easy to love,” he said. “I probably wouldn’t love them so much if they were.” It was a very Heinleinerish thing to say; these folks cherish perversity, you understand.

“You’re saying only a father could love ’em?”

“Or a mother.”

“That’s what I’m counting on,” I said, and patted my belly.

“You’ll either love him quick, or drown him.” We walked on for a while without saying anything. Every once in a while one of the null-field safety locks would vanish in front of us and re-appear behind us. All automatic, and all happening only for those with null-suits installed.

These people didn’t engineer anything any better than they had to, and the reason was simply that they had this marvelous back-up system. It’s going to be revolutionary, I tell you.

“I get the feeling you don’t approve,” he said, at last.

“Of what? Your kids? Hey, I was just—”

“Of what they do.”

“Well, Winston sure does. I think he’s eaten half their stock.”

I was thinking fast. I wanted to learn more from this man, and the way to do that is not by running down his children and his way of life. But one of the things I knew about him was that he didn’t like liars, was good at detecting them, and, though a career in reporting had made me a world-class liar, I wasn’t sure I could get one by him. And I wasn’t sure I
wanted
to. I had hoped I’d put a lot of that behind me. So instead of answering his question, I said something else, a technique familiar to any journalist or politician.

And it seemed to have worked. He just grunted, and reached down to pet Winston’s ugly mug. Once more the hound came through for me, not taking off the hand at the wrist. Still digesting the horselet, probably.

We came to a door marked MAIN DRIVE ROOM, and he held it open for me. You could have driven a golf ball into the room and never hit a wall, and you could have driven a medium-size rover race in it. Whether you could drive a spaceship the size of the
Heinlein
was very much an open question. But in front of me were the signs that someone was trying.