by John Varley
"You're looking good," Fox said.
"Thanks. You all done here for now?"
"Until Monday. I hate to be one of those people married to the job, but if somebody doesn't worry about it this place won't live up to its potential."
"Still the same Fox." I put my arm around his waist as we walked toward his trailer, parked in a jumble of idle machines. He put his hand on my shoulder, but I could tell his thoughts were still back in the blueprints.
"I guess so. But this is going to be the best disney yet, Hildy. Mount Hood is finished; all we need is some snow. It's only one-quarter scale, but it fools the eye from almost any angle. The Columbia's full and almost up to speed. The gorge is going to be magnificent. We're going to have a real salmon run. I've got Douglas Firs twenty meters high. Even when you force-grow 'em, those babies take some time. Deer, grizzlies… it'll be great."
"How long till completion?" We were passing some bear pens. The inmates looked out at us with lazy predators' eyes.
"Five years, if it all goes well. Probably seven, realistically." He held the door to the trailer and followed me inside. It was utilitarian, overflowing with papers. About the only personal touch I saw was an antique slide rule mounted over the gas fireplace. "You want to order something in? There's a good Japanese place that will deliver here. I had to train them; this place is tough to find. Or we could go out if there's something else you'd rather have."
I knew exactly what I wanted, and we wouldn't have to order out for it. I put my arms around him and kissed him in a way that almost made up for the forty years we'd been out of each others' beds. When I drew back for a breath, he was smiling down at me.
"Is this dress a particular favorite?" he asked. He had his hand in the neckline, bunching the fabric.
"Would it do me any good to say yes?"
He slowly shook his head, and ripped it off.
***
Lovers of fashion should be relieved to note two things: the dress was thirty years old and not one of those that was stylish again, though I had picked it because it flattered the new me. Bobbie would have gagged to see it, but Fox was more direct. And second, I had known Fox would destroy it, though not as a fashion policeman-male or female, Fox was dense about such things. The main thing one needed to know about Fox was that-male or female-he liked to dominate. He liked sex to be rough and urgent and just this side of brutal, and that was exactly what I was in the mood for. As he gave me one of the most thorough rogerings of my life I thanked what gods there be that I had found him during a male period of his life.
Fox was the one I had thought of as I stood nervously on the brink of Change, and it made perfect sense that I did. He and I… actually, for a time it had been she and I, then he and I… we had been lovers for ten years. I don't know just why we broke up, or maybe I've forgotten, but we came out of the parting good friends. Perhaps we simply grew apart, as they say, though that's always sounded like a facile explanation. How much growing do you still have to do when one of you is sixty and the other is fifty-five? But it had been a comfortable time in my life.
The need to see him had been so urgent I had changed my plan to do a little shopping on the Platz, thereby doing my bank balance a big favor. I had rushed home, dressed in the scoop-necked, knee-length satiny black dress with the ballerina skirt that currently lay tattered, wrinkled, and getting very sweaty beneath my naked back, changed my hair color to match the clothes, sprayed make-up on my eyes and mouth and polish on my nails, doused myself with Fox's favorite scent, and was back out the door in three minutes flat. I had taxied to Oregon, worked my feminine magic on the poor boy and within fifteen minutes had my knees in the air and my hands gripping his bare behind, barking like a dog and trying to force him through my body and into the floor beneath us.
Do you see why ULTRA-Tingle is already in financial trouble?
Fox usually had that effect on me. Not always quite so intense, it's true. I was experiencing something politely called hormone shock, or Change mania, but more often known as going cunt crazy. One shouldn't expect to undergo such radical alterations to one's body without a certain upset to the psyche. With me it's always a heightening of sexual hunger. Some people simply get irresponsible. I've got a friend who has to instruct his bank to shut off his line of credit for five days after a Change, or he'd spend every shilling he had.
What I was spending you can't put in a bank, and there's no sense in saving it anyway.
***
Afterwards, he ordered a mountain of sushi and tempura and when it was delivered, fired up the trailer and took us through a long dark air duct and into Oregon.
Like all disneylands, it was a huge hemispherical bubble, more or less flat on the bottom, the curved roof painted blue. The first ones had been only a kilometer or two across, but as the engineers figured out better ways to support them, the newer ones were growing with no outer limit in sight. Oregon was one of the biggest, along with two others currently under construction: Kansas and Borneo. Fox tried his best not to bore me with statistics; I simply forget them a few minutes after hearing them. Suffice it to say the place was very big.
The floor was mostly rock and dirt shaped into hills and two mountains. The one he'd called Mount Hood was tall and sharply pointed. The other was truncated and looked unfinished.
"That's going to be a volcano," he said. "Or at least a good approximation of an active volcano. There was an eruption in this area in historic times."
"You mean lava and fire and smoke?"
"I wish we could. But the power requirements to melt enough rock for a worthwhile eruption would bust the budget, plus any really good volume of smoke would hurt the trees and wildlife. What it's going to do is vent steam three or four times a day and shoot sparks at night. Should be real pretty. The project manager's trying to convince the money people to fund a yearly ash plume-nothing catastrophic, it actually benefits the trees. And I'm pretty sure we'll be able to mount a modest lava flow every ten or twenty years."
"I wish I could see it better. It's pretty dim in here." The only real light sources were at the scattered tree farms, dots of bright green in the blasted landscape.
"Let me get the sun turned on." He picked up a mike and talked to the power section, and a few minutes later the "sun" flickered and then blazed directly overhead.
"All this will be covered in virgin forest; green as far as the eye can see. Not at all like your shack in Texas. This is a wet, cool climate, lots of snow in higher elevations. Mostly conifers. We're even putting in a grove of sequoias down in the south part, though we're fudging a bit on that, geographically speaking."
"Green'd be a lot better than this," I said.
"You'll never be a true West Texan, Hildy," he told me, and smiled.
He set us down on the Columbia River, at the mouth of the gorge where it was wider and slower, on a broad, flat sandbar of an island which was the center of what he called an ecological test-bed. The beach was wide and hard-packed, full of frozen ripples. Across the river were the advertised pine trees, but near us there was only estuarine vegetation, the sort of plants that didn't mind being flooded periodically. It ran to tall skinny grasses and low, hardy bushes, few taller than my head. There were some really huge logs half buried in the sand, bleached gray-white and rubbed smooth and round by sun, wind, and water. I realized they were artificial, put there to impress the occasional visitors, who were always brought here.
We spread out a blanket on the sand and sat there gorging ourselves on the food. He stuck mostly to the shrimpoid tempura while I concentrated on the maguro, uni, hamachi, toro, tako and paper-thin slices of fugu. I dredged each piece in enough of that wonderful green horseradish to make my nose run and my ears turn bright red. Then we made love again, slow and tender for the first hour, unusual for Fox, only getting intense near the end. We stretched out in the sun and never quite fell asleep, just lolling like satiated reptiles. At least I hadn't thought I was asleep until Fox woke me by flipping me over on
to my stomach and entering me without any warning. (No, not that way. Fox likes to initiate it and he likes it rough, but he's not into giving pain and I'm not into receiving it.) Anyway, these things even out. When Fox was a girl she usually forced herself down on me before she was quite ready. Maybe he thought all girls liked it that way. I didn't enlighten him, because I didn't mind it that much and the love-making that followed was always Olympic quality.
And afterwards…
There's always an afterwards. Perhaps that's why my ten years with Fox was the longest relationship I ever had. After the sex, most of them want to talk to you, and I always had trouble finding people I wanted to talk to as well as have sex with. Fox was the exception. So afterwards…
I put the remains of my clothing back on. The dress was severely ripped; I couldn't get it to stay over my left breast, and there were gaping holes here and there. It suited my mood. We walked along the river's edge in water that never covered our feet. I was playing the castaway game. This time I could pretend to be a rich socialite in the tatters of her fancy gown, desperately seeking good native help. I trailed my toes in the water as I walked.
This place was timeless and unreal in a way Scarpa Island never was. The sun still hung there at high noon. I picked up a handful of sand and peered at it, and it was just as detailed as the imaginary sand of my year-long mental environment. It smelled different. It was riverine sand, not white coral, and the water was fresh instead of salty, with a different set of microscopic lifeforms in it. The water was warmer than the Pacific waters. Hell, it was quite hot in Oregon, into the lower forties. Something to do with the construction. We had both dripped sweat all day. I had licked it off his body and found it quite tasty. Not so much the sweat as the body I licked it from.
The setting could not have been more perfect if I'd picked it myself. Say, Fox, this place reminds me of an odd little adventure I had one day about a week ago, between 15:30.0002 P.M. and around, oh, let's say 15:30.0009. And isn't it amazing how times flies when you're having fun.
So I said something a little less puzzling than that, and gradually told him the story. Right up to the punch line, at which point I gagged on it.
Fox wasn't as reticent as Callie.
"I've heard of the technique, of course," he said. "I ought to be surprised you hadn't, but I guess you still shy away from technology, just like you used to."
"It's not very relevant to my job. Or my life."
"That's what you thought. It must seem more relevant now."
"Granted. It's never jumped up and bit me before."
"That's what I can't figure. What you describe is a radical treatment for mental problems. I can't imagine the CC using it on you without your consent unless you had something seriously wrong with you."
He let that hang, and once more I gagged. Give Fox points for candor; he didn't let a little thing like my obvious humiliation stand in his way.
"So what is your problem?" he asked, artless as a three-year-old.
"What's the penalty for littering in here?" I said.
"Go ahead. This whole area will be re-landscaped before the public gets to track things in with their muddy feet."
I took off the ruined dress and balled it up as well as I could. I hurled it out toward the water. It ballooned, fell into the gentle current. We watched it float for a short distance, soak up water, and hang up on the bottom. Fox had said you could walk a hundred meters out from the island and not be in much deeper than your knees. After that it got deep quickly. We had come to the point where the island ended at the upstream end. We stood on the last little bit of sand and watched the current nudge the dress an inch at a time. I drew a ragged breath and felt a tear run down my cheek.
"If I'd known you felt that way about the dress, I'd never have torn it." When I glanced at him he took the tear on the tip of his finger and licked the finger with his tongue. I smiled weakly. I walked out into the water, heading upstream, and could hear him following behind me.
Some of it was the hormonal shock, I'm sure. I don't cry much, and no more when I'm female than when male. The change probably released it, and it felt right; it was time to cry. It was time to admit how frightened I was by the whole thing.
I sat down in the warm water. It didn't cover my legs. I started working my hands into the sand on each side of me.
"It seems that I keep trying to kill myself," I said.
He was standing beside me. I looked up at him, wiped away another tear. God, he looked good. I wanted to move to him, make him ready again with my mouth, recline on this watery bed and have him move inside me with the slow, gentle rhythms of the river. Was that a life-affirming urge, or a death wish, metaphorically speaking? Was I in the river of life, or was I fantasizing about becoming part of the detritus that all rivers sweep eternally to the sea? There was no sea at the end of this river, just a deeper, saltier growing biome for the salmon that would soon teem here, struggling upstream to die. The sky the sun would wester and die in was a painted backdrop. Did the figures of speech of Old Earth still pertain here?
It had to be an image of life. I wasn't tired of livin', and I was very skeered of dyin'. He just keeps rolling, don't he? Isn't that what life's all about?
Be that as it may, Fox was not the man for gentle river rhythms, not twice in one day. He'd get carried away and in my present mood I would snap at him. So I kissed his leg and resumed my excavation work in the sand.
He sat down behind me and put his legs on each side of me and started massaging my shoulders. I don't think I ever loved him more than at that moment. It was exactly what I needed. I hung my head, went boneless as an eel, let him dig his strong fingers into every knot and twitch.
"Can I say… I don't want to hurt you, how should I say it? I should have been surprised to hear that. I mean, it's awful, it's unexpected, it's not something you want to hear from a dear friend, and I want to say 'No, Hildy, it can't be true!' You know? But I was surprised to find that… I wasn't surprised. What an awful thing to say."
"No, go ahead and say it," I murmured. His hands were working on my head now. Much more pressure and my skull would crack, and more power to him. Maybe some of the demons would fly away through the fissures.
"In some ways, Hildy, you've always been the unhappiest person I know."
I let that sink in without protest, just as I was sinking very slowly into the sand beneath me. I was a light brown sack of sand he was shaping with his fingers. I found nothing wrong with this sensation.
"I think it's your job," he said.
"Do you really?"
"It must have occurred to you. Tell me you love your work, and I'll shut up."
There was no sense saying anything to that.
"Not going to say anything about how good you are at reporting? No comments about how exciting it is? You are good, you know. Too good, in my opinion. Ever get anywhere on that novel?"
"Not so's you'd notice."
"What about working for another pad? One a little less interested in celebrity marriages and violent death."
"I don't think that would help anything; I never had much respect for journalism as a profession in the first place. At least the Nipple doesn't pretend to be anything but what it is."
"Pure shit."
"Exactly. I know you're right. I'm not happy in my work. I'm pretty sure I'm going to be quitting soon. All that stops me is I don't have any idea what I'd do as an alternative."
"I hear there's openings in the Coolie's Union. They won the contract for Borneo. The Hod-carriers are still muttering about it."
"Nice to hear they get excited about something. Maybe I should," I said, half-seriously. "Less wear and tear on the nerves."
"It wouldn't work out. I'll tell you what your problem is, Hildy. You've always wanted to be… useful. You wanted to do something important."
"Make a difference? Change the world? I don't think so."
"I think you gave up on it before I met you. There's always been a streak of
bitterness in you about that; it's one of the reasons we broke up."
"Really? Why didn't you tell me?"
"I'm not sure I knew it at the time."
We were both quiet for a while, tromping down memory lane. I was pleased to note that, even with this revelation, the memories were mostly good. He kept massaging me, pushing me forward now to get at my lower back. I offered no resistance, letting my head fall forward. I could see my hair trailing in the water. I wonder why people can't purr like cats? If I could have, I would have been at that moment. Maybe I should take it up with the CC. He could probably find a way to make it work.
He began to slow down in his work. No one ever wants that sort of thing to stop, but I knew his hands were tiring. I leaned back against him and he encircled me with his arms under my breasts. I put my hands on his knees.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
"You know you can."
"What makes life worth living for you?"
He didn't give it a flip answer, which I'd half expected. He thought it over for a while, then sighed and rested his chin on my shoulder.
"I don't know if that's really answerable. There's surface reasons. The most obvious one is I get a sense of accomplishment from my work."
"I envy you that," I said. "Your work doesn't get erased after a ten-second read."
"There's disappointment there, too. I had sort of wanted to build these things." His arm swept out to take in the uncompleted vastness of Oregon. "Turned out my talents lay in other directions. That would be a sense of accomplishment, to leave something like this behind you."
"Is that the key? Leaving something behind? For 'posterity?'"
"Fifty years ago I might have said yes. And it's certainly a reason. I think it's the reason for most people who have the wit to ask what life's all about in the first place. I'm not sure if it's enough reason for me anymore. Not that I'm unhappy; I do love my work, I'm eager to arrive here every morning, I work late, I come in on weekends. But as to leaving something that I created, my work is even more ephemeral than yours."
