Steel Beach (4 page)

“It’s the one hundred and ninety-ninth anniversary of the Invasion and Occupation of the Planet Earth.”

“Remind me to light a candle and say a novena.”

“You think it’s funny.”

“Nothing funny about it,” I said. “I just wonder what it has to do with me.”

Walter nodded, and put his feet down on the floor.

“How many stories have you seen on the Invasion in the last week? The week leading up to this anniversary?”

I was willing to play along.

“Let’s see. Counting the stuff in
The Straight Shit
, the items in the
Lunarian
and the
K.C. News
, that incisive series in
Lunatime
, and of course our own voluminous coverage…  none. Not a single story.”

“That’s right. I think it’s time somebody did something about that.”

“While we’re at it, let’s do a big spread on the Battle of Agincourt, and the first manned landing on Mars.”

“You do think it’s funny.”

“I’m merely applying a lesson somebody taught me when I started here. If it happened yesterday, it ain’t news. And
The News Nipple
reports the news.”

“This isn’t strictly for the
Nipple
,” Walter admitted.

“Uh-oh.”

He ignored my expression, which I hoped was sufficiently sour, and plowed ahead.

“We’ll use cuts from your stories in the
Nipple
. Most of ’em, anyway. You’ll have Brenda to do most of the leg work.”

“What are you talking about?” Brenda asked Walter. When that didn’t work, she turned to me. “What’s he talking about?”

“I’m talking about the supplement.”

“He’s talking about the old reporters’ graveyard.”

“Just one story a week. Will you let me explain?”

I settled back in my chair and tried to turn off my brain.

Oh, I’d fight it hard enough, but I knew I didn’t have much choice when Walter got that look in his eye.

The
News Nipple
Corporation publishes three pads. The first is the
Nipple
itself, updated hourly, full of what Walter Editor liked to think of as “lively” stories: the celebrity scandal, the pseudo-scientific breakthrough, psychic predictions, lovingly bloody coverage of disasters. We covered the rougher and more proletarian sports, and a certain amount of politics, if the proposition involved could be expressed in a short sentence. The
Nipple
had so many pictures you hardly needed to read the words. Like the other padloids, it would not have bothered with any copy but for the government literacy grants that often provided the financial margin between success and failure. A daily quota of words was needed to qualify for the grants. That exact number of words appeared in each of our issues, including “a,” “an,” “and,” and “the.”

The
Daily Cream
was the intellectual appendix to the swollen intestine of the
Nipple
. It came free to every subscriber of the pad—those government grants again—and was read by about one in ten, according to our more optimistic surveys. It published thousands of times more words per hour, and included most of our political coverage.

Somewhere between those two was the electronic equivalent of the Sunday supplement, published weekly, called
Sundae
.

“Here’s what I want,” Walter went on. “You’ll go out and cover your regular beats. But I want you to be thinking
Sundae
while you do that. Whatever you’re covering, think about how it would have been different two hundred years ago, back on Earth. It can be anything at all. Like today, sex.
There’s
a topic for you. Write about what sex was like back on Earth, and contrast it to what it’s like now. You could even throw in stuff about what people think it’s gonna be like in another twenty years, or a century.”

“Walter, I don’t deserve this.”

“Hildy, you’re the only man for it. I want one article per week for the entire year leading up to the Bicentennial. I’m giving you a free hand as to what they’re about. You can editorialize. You can personalize, make it like a column. You’ve always wanted a column; here’s your chance at a byline. You want expensive consultants, advisors, research? You name it, you got it. You need to travel? I’m good for the money. I want only the best for this series.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. It was a good offer. Nothing in life is ever exactly what you asked for, but I
had
wanted a column, and this seemed like a reasonable shot at it.

“Hildy, during the twentieth century there was a time like no other time humans have seen before or since. My grandfather’s great-grandfather was born in the year the Wright brothers made the first powered flight. By the time he died, there was a permanent base on Luna. My grandfather was ten when the old man died, and he’s told me many times how he used to talk about the old days. It was amazing just how much change that old man had seen in his lifetime.

“In that century they started talking about a ‘generation gap.’ So much happened, so many things changed so fast, how was a seventy-year-old supposed to talk to a fifteen-year-old in terms they both could understand?

“Well, things don’t change quite that fast anymore. I wonder if they ever will again? But we’ve got something in common with those people. We’ve got kids like Brenda here who hardly remember anything beyond last year, and they’re living side by side with people who were born and grew up on the Earth. People who remember what a one-gee gravity field was like, what it was to walk around outside and breathe free, un-metered air. Who were raised when people were born, grew up, and died in the same sex. People who fought in wars. Our oldest citizens are almost three hundred now. Surely there’s fifty-two stories in that.

“This is a story that’s been waiting two hundred years to be told. We’ve had our heads in the sand. We’ve been beaten, humiliated, suffered a racial set-back that I’m afraid…  ”

It was as if he suddenly had heard what he was saying. He sputtered to a stop, not looking me in the eye.

I was not used to speeches from Walter. It made me uneasy. The assignment made me uneasy. I don’t think about the Invasion much—which was precisely his point, of course—and I think that’s just as well. But I could see his passion, and knew I’d better not fight it. I was used to rage, to being chewed out for this or that. Being appealed to was something brand new. I felt it was time to lighten the atmosphere a little.

“So how big a raise are we talking about here?” I asked.

He settled back in his chair and smiled, back on familiar ground.

“You know I never discuss that. It’ll be in your next paycheck. If you don’t like it, gripe to me then.”

“And I have to use the kid on all this stuff?”

“Hey! I’m right here,” Brenda protested.

“The kid is vital to the whole thing. She’s your sounding board. If a fact from the old days sounds weird to her, you know you’re onto something. She’s contemporary as your last breath, she’s eager to learn and fairly bright, and she knows
nothing
. You’ll be the middle man. You’re about the right age for it, and history’s your hobby. You know more about old Earth than any man your age I’ve ever met.”

“If I’m in the middle…  ”

“You might want to interview my grandfather,” Walter suggested. “But there’ll be a third member of your team. Somebody Earth-born. I haven’t decided yet who that’ll be. Now get out of here, both of you.”

I could see Brenda had a thousand questions she still wanted to ask. I warned her off with my eyes, and followed her to the door.

“And Hildy,” Walter said. I looked back.

“If you put words like abnegation and infibulation in these stories, I’ll personally caponize you.”

I pulled the tarp off my pile of precious lumber and watched the scorpions scuttle away in the sunlight. Say what you want about the sanctity of life; I like to crush ’em.

Deeper in the pile I’d disturbed a rattlesnake. I didn’t see him, but could hear him warning me away. Handling them from the ends, I selected a plank and pulled it out. I shouldered it and carried it to my half-finished cabin. It was evening, the best time to work in West Texas. The temperature had dropped to ninety-five in the oldstyle scale they used there. During the day it had been well over a hundred.

I positioned the plank on two sawhorses near what would be the front porch when I was finished. I squatted and looked down its length. This was a one-by-ten—inches, not centimeters—which meant it actually measured about nine by seven eighths, for reasons no one had ever explained to me. Thinking in inches was difficult enough, without dealing in those odd ratios called fractions. What was wrong with decimals, and what was wrong with a one-by-ten actually being one inch by ten inches? Why twelve inches in a foot? Maybe there was a story in it for the Bicentennial series.

The plank had been advertised as ten feet long, and
that
measurement was accurate. It was also supposed to be straight, but if it was they had used a noodle for a straightedge.

Texas was the second of what was to be three disneylands devoted to the eighteenth century. Out here west of the Pecos we reckoned it to be 1845, the last year of the Texas Republic, though you could use technology as recent as 1899 without running afoul of the anachronism regulations. Pennsylvania had been the first of the triad, and my plank, complete with two big bulges in the width and a depressing sag when held by one end, had been milled there by “Amish” sawyers using the old methods. A little oval stamp in a corner guaranteed this: “Approved, Lunar Antiquities Reproduction Board.” Either the methods of the 1800’s couldn’t reliably produce straight and true lumber, or those damn Dutchmen were still learning their craft.

So I did what the carpenters of the Texas Republic had done. I got out my plane (also certified by the L.A.R.B.), removed the primitive blade, sharpened it against a home-made whetstone, re-attached the blade, and began shaving away the irregularities.

I’m not complaining. I was lucky to get the lumber. Most of the cabin was made of rough-hewn logs notched together at the ends, chinked with adobe.

The board had turned gray in the heat and sun, but after a few strokes I was down to the yellow pine interior. The wood curled up around the blade and the chips dropped around my bare feet. It smelled fresh and new and I found myself smiling as the sweat dripped off my nose. It would be good to be a carpenter, I thought. Maybe I’d quit the newspaper business.

Then the blade broke and jammed into the wood. My palm slipped off the knob in front and tried to skate across the fresh-planed surface, driving long splinters into my skin. The plane clattered off the board and went for my toe with the hellish accuracy of a pain-guided missile.

I shouted a few words rarely heard in 1845, and some uncommon even in the 23rd century. I hopped around on one foot. Another lost art, hopping.

“It could have been worse,” a voice said in my ear. It was either incipient schizophrenia, or the Central Computer. I bet on the CC.

“How? By hitting
both
feet?”

“Gravity. Consider the momentum such a massive object could have attained, had this really been West Texas, which lies at the bottom of a spacetime depression twenty-five thousand miles per hour deep.”

Definitely
the CC.

I examined my hand. Blood was oozing from it, running down my forearm and dripping from the elbow. But there was no arterial pumping. The foot, though it still hurt like fire, was not damaged.

“You see now why laborers in 1845 wore work boots.”

“Is that why you called, CC? To give me a lecture about safety in the work place?”

“No. I was going to announce a visitor. The colorful language lesson was an unexpected bonus of my tuning in on—”

“Shut up, will you?”

The Central Computer did so.

The end of a splinter protruded from my palm, so I pulled on it. I got some, but a lot was still buried in there. Others had broken off below skin level. All in all, a wonderful day’s work.

A visitor? I looked around and saw no one, though a whole tribe of Apaches could have been hiding in the clumps of mesquite. I had not expected to see any sign of the CC. It uses the circuitry in my own head to produce its voice.

And it wasn’t supposed to manifest itself in Texas. As is often the case, there was more to the CC than it was telling.

“CC, on-line, please.”

“I hear and obey.”

“Who’s the visitor?”

“Tall, young, ignorant of tampons, with a certain puppy-like charm—”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“I know I’m not supposed to intrude on these antique environments, but she was quite insistent on learning your location, and I thought it better for you to have some forewarning than to—”

“Okay. Now shut up.”

I sat in the rickety chair which had been my first carpentry project. Being careful of the injured hand, I pulled on the work boots I should have been wearing all along. The reason I hadn’t was simple: I hated them.

There was another story for Walter. Shoes. If Lunarians wear them, they tend to be the soft kind, like moccasins, or socks. Reason: in a crowded urban environment of perfectly smooth floors and carpets and a majority of bare-foot people, hard shoes are anti-social. You could break someone else’s toes.

Once I had my feet jammed into the smelly things I had to search for the buttonhook. Buttons, on shoes! It was outrageous. How had people ever tolerated such things? To add insult to inutility, the damn things had cost me a fortune.

I stood and was about to head into town when the CC spoke again.

“If you leave those tools out and it rains, they will combine with the oxygen in the air in a slow combustion reaction.”

“Rust is too poor a word for you, right? It rains out here…  what? Once every hundred days?”

But my heart wasn’t in it. The CC was right. If button-up torture devices were expensive, period tools were worth a king’s ransom. My plane, saw, hammer and chisel had cost a year’s salary. The good news was I could re-sell them for more than I paid…  if they weren’t rusted.