by John Varley
But a century of technological improvements, of fail-safe systems that transcended the merely careful and entered the realms of the preposterous, of pyramided knowledge of how to live in a hostile environment… a hundred years of this had worked as sea-change on Lunar society. The cities had turned over, like I've heard lakes do periodically, and the bottom had risen to the top. The formerly swank levels of Bedrock were now the slums, and the Vac Rows in the upper levels were now-suitable renovated-the place to be. Anyone who aspired to be somebody had to have a real window on the surface.
There were some exceptions. Old reactionaries like Callie still liked to burrow deep, though she had no horror of the surface. And a significant minority still suffered from that most common Lunar phobia, fear of airlessness. They managed well enough, I suppose. I've read that a lot of people on Old Earth feared high places or flying in aircraft, which must have been a problem in a society that valued the penthouse apartment and quick travel.
Nirvana was not the most exclusive surface resort on Luna, but it wasn't the type hawked in three-day two-night package deals, either. I've never understood the attraction of paying an exorbitant amount for a "natural" view of the surface while basking in the carefully filtered rays of the sun. I'd much prefer just about any of the underground disneys. If you wanted a swimming pool, there were any number belowground where the water was just as wet. But some people find simulated earth environments frightening. A surprising number of people just don't like plants, or the insects that hide themselves among the leaves, and have no real use for animals, either. Nirvana catered to these folks, and to the urge to be seen with other people who had enough money to blow in a place like that. It featured gambling, dancing, tanning, and some amazingly childish games organized by the management, all done under the sun or the stars in the awesome beauty of Destination Valley.
And it had damn well better be awesome. The builders had spent a huge amount of money to make it that way.
Destination Valley was a three-kilometer Lunar rift that had been artfully carved into the kind of jagged peaks and sheer cliffs that a valley on "The Moon" should have been, if God had employed a more flamboyant set designer, the sort of lunar feature everybody imagined before the opening of the age of space and the return of the first, dismal pictures of what Luna really looked like. There were no acned rolling hillocks here, no depressing gray-and-white fields of scoria, no boulders with all the edges rubbed off by a billion years of scorching days and bitter cold nights… and none of that godawful boring dust that covers everything else on Luna. Here the craters had sharp edges lined with jagged teeth. The cliffs soared straight up, loomed over you like breaking waves. The boulders were studded with multi-colored volcanic glasses that shattered the raw sunlight into a thousand colors or glowed with warm ruby red or sapphire blue as if lit from within-which some of them were. Strange crystalline growths leaped toward the sky or spread across the ground like sinister deep-sea creatures, quartzes the size of ten-story buildings embedded themselves in the ground as if dropped from a great height, and feathery structures with hairs finer than fiber optics, so fragile they would break in the exhaust from a passing p-suit, clung like sea urchins and glowed in the dark. The horizon was sculpted with equal care into a range to shame the Rockies for sheer rugged beauty… until you hiked into them and found they were quite puny, magnified by cunning lighting and tricks of forced perspective.
But the valley floor was a rockhound's dream. It was like walking into a mammoth geode. And it was all the naked geology that, in the end, had proven to be the downfall of Nirvana.
One of the four main pleasure domes had nestled at the foot of a cliff called, in typical breathless Nirvanan prose, The Threshold Of Heavenly Peace. It had been formed of seventeen of the largest, clearest quartz columns ever synthesized, and the whole structure had been rat-nested with niches for spotlights, lasers, and image projectors. During the day it did nice things with the sunlight, but the real show was at night, when light shows ran constantly. The effect had been designed to be soothing, relaxing, suggesting the eternal peace of some unspecified heaven. The images that could be seen within were not well-defined. They were almost-seen, just out of sight, elusive, and hypnotic. I'd been at the opening show, and for all my cynicism about the place itself, had to admit that the Threshold was almost worth the price of a ticket.
The detonation in Kansas had nudged an un-mapped fault line a few klicks from Nirvana, resulting in a short, sharp quake that lifted Destination Valley a few centimeters and set it down with a thud. The only real damage done to the place, other than a lot of broken crockery, was that one of the columns had been shaken loose and crashed down on dome #3, known as the Threshold Dome. The dome was thick, and strong, and transparent, with no ugly geodesic lines to mar the view, having been formed from a large number of hexagonal components bonded together in a process that was discussed endlessly in the ensuing weeks, and which I don't understand at all. It was further strengthened by some sort of molecular field intensifier. It should have been strong enough to withstand the impact of Tower #14, at least long enough to evacuate the dome. And it had, for about five seconds. But some sort of vibration was set up in the dome material, and somehow magnified by the field intensifier, and three of the four-meter hex panels on the side away from the cliffs had fractured along the join lines and been blown nearly into orbit by the volume of air trying to get through that hole. Along with the air had gone everything loose, including all the people who weren't holding on to something, and many who were. It must have been a hell of a wind. Some of the bodies were found up on the rim of the valley.
By the time I got there most of the action was long over. A blowout is like that. There's a few minutes when a person exposed to raw vacuum can be saved; after that, it's time for the coroner. Except for a few people trapped in self-sealing rooms who would soon be extricated-and no amount of breathless commentary could make these routine operations sound exciting-the rest of the Collapse story was confined to ogling dead bodies and trying to find an angle.
The bodies definitely were not the story. Your average Nipple reader enjoys blood and gore, but there is a disgust threshold that might be defined as the yuck factor. Burst eyeballs and swollen tongues are all right, as is any degree of laceration or dismemberment. But the thing about a blow-out death is, the human body has a certain amount of gas in it, in various cavities. A lot of it is in the intestine. What happens when that gas expands explosively and comes rushing out its natural outlet is not something to use as a lead item in your coverage. We showed the bodies, you couldn't help that, we just didn't dwell on them.
No, the real story here was the same story any time there is a big disaster. Number two: children. Number three: tragic coincidences. And always a big number one: celebrities.
Nirvana didn't cater to children. They didn't forbid them, they just didn't encourage mommy and daddie to bring little junior along, and most of the clientele wouldn't have done so, anyway. I mean, what would that say about your relationship with the nanny? Only three children died in the Kansas Collapse-which simply made them that much more poignant in the eyes of the readership. I tracked down the grandparents of one three-year-old and got a genuine reaction shot when they learned the news about the child's death. I needed a stiff drink or two after that one. Some things a reporter does are slimier than others.
Then there's the "if-only" story, with the human angle. "We were planning to spend the week at Nirvana, but we didn't go because blah blah blah." "I just went back to the room to get my thingamabob when the next thing I knew all the alarms were going off and I thought, where's my darling hubby?" The public had an endless appetite for stories like that. Subconsciously, I think they think the gods of luck will favor them when the tromp of doom starts to thump. As for survivor interviews, I find them very boring, but I'm apparently in the minority. At least half of them had this to say: "God was watching over me." Most of those people didn't even believe in a god. This is the de
ity-as-hit-man view of theology. What I always thought was, if God was looking out for you, he must have had a real hard-on for all those folks he belted into the etheric like so many rubbery javelins.
Then there were the handful of stories that didn't quite fit any of these categories, what I call heart-warming tragedies. The best to come out of Nirvana was the couple of lovers found two kilometers from the blowout, still holding hands. Given that they'd been blown through the hole in the dome, their bodies weren't in the best shape, but that was okay, and since they'd outdistanced the stream of brown exhaust that no doubt would have seemed to be propelling them on their way, had anyone survived to report on that improbable event, they were quite presentable. They were just lying there, two guys with sweet smiles on their faces, at the base of a rock formation the photographer had managed to frame to resemble a church window. Walter paid through the nose to run it on his front feed, just like all the other editors.
The reporter on that story was my old rival Cricket, and it just goes to show you what initiative can accomplish. While the rest of us were standing around the ruins of dome #3, picking our journalistic noses, Cricket hired a p-suit and followed the recovery crews out into the field, bringing an actual film camera for maximum clarity. She'd bribed a team to delay recovery of the pair until she could fix smiles on the faces and pick up the popped-out eyeballs and close the eyelids. She knew what she wanted in that picture, and what it got her was a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize that year.
But the big story was the dead celebs. Of the one thousand, one hundred and twenty-six dead in Nirvana, five had been Important in one way or another. In ascending order of magnitude, they were a politician from Clavius District, a visiting pop singer from Mercury, a talk-show host and hostess, and Larry Yeager, whose newest picture's release date was moved up three weeks to cash in on all the public mourning. His career had been in decline or he wouldn't have been at Nirvana in the first place, but while being seen alive in a place like that was a definite indicator that one's star was imploding, soon to be a black hole-Larry had formerly moved in only the most rarefied orbits-where you die is not nearly as important to a posthumous career as how you die. Tragically is best. Young is good. Violently, bizarrely, notoriously… all these things combined in the Kansas Collapse to boost the market value of the Yeager Estate's copyrights to five times their former market value.
Of course there was the other story. The "how" and the "why." I'm always much more concerned in where, when, and who. Covering the investigations into the Collapse, as always, would be an endless series of boring meetings and hours and hours of testimony about matters I was not technologically equipped to handle anyway. The final verdict would not be in for months or years, at which time the Nipple would be interested in "who" once more, as in "who takes the fall for this fuck-up?" In the meantime the Nipple could indulge in ceaseless speculation, character assassination, and violence to many reputations, but that wasn't my department. I read this stuff uneasily every day, fearing that Fox's name would somehow come up, but it never did.
What with one thing and another… mostly bothering widows and orphans, I am forced to admit… the Collapse kept me hopping for about a week. I indulged in a lot of mind-numbing preparations, mostly Margaritas, my poison of choice, and kept a nervous weather eye open for signs of impending depression. I saw some-there's no way you can cover a story like that without feeling grief yourself, and a certain self-loathing from time to time-but I never got really depressed, as in goodbye-cruel-world depressed.
I concluded that keeping busy was the best therapy.
***
One of the one thousand, one hundred and twenty-one other people who died in Nirvana was the mother of the Princess of Wales, the King of England, Henry XI. In spite of his impressive title, Hank had never in his life done anything worth a back-feed article in the Nipple, until he died. And that's where the obit ran, the back-feed, with a small "isn't it ironic" graph by a cub reporter mentioning a few of his more notorious relatives: Richard III, Henry VIII, Mary Stuart. Walter blue-penciled most of it for the next edition, with the immortal words "nobody gives a shit about all that Shakespearean crap," and substituted a sidebar about Vickie Hanover and her weird ideas about sex that influenced an entire age.
The only reason Henry XI was in Nirvana in the first place was that he was in charge of the plumbing in dome #3. Not the air system; the sewage.
But the upshot was that, on my first free day since the disaster, my phone informed me that someone not on my "accept-calls" list wanted to speak to me, and was identifying herself as Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. I drew a blank for a moment, then realized it was the terrifying fighting machine I had known as Wales. I let the call through.
She spent the first few minutes apologizing all over again, asking if her check had arrived, and please call me Liz.
"Reason I called," she finally said, "I don't know if you heard, but my mother died in the Nirvana disaster."
"I did know that. I'm sorry, I should have sent a condolence card or something."
"That's okay. You don't really know me well enough, and I hated the boozing son-of-a-bitch anyway. He made my life hell for many years. But now that he's finally gone… see, I'm having this sort of coronation party tomorrow and I wondered if you'd like to come? And a guest, too, of course."
I wondered if the invitation was the result of continuing guilt over the way she'd torn me apart, or if she was angling for coverage in the pad. But I didn't mention either of those things. I was about to beg off, then remembered there had been something I'd wanted to talk to her about. I accepted.
"Oh," I said, as she was about to ring off. "Ah, what about dress? Should it be formal?"
"Semi," she said. "No need for any full uniforms. And the reception afterward will be informal. Just a party, really. Oh, and no gifts." She laughed. "I'm only supposed to accept gifts from other heads of state."
"That lets me out. See you tomorrow."
***
The Royal Coronation was held in Suite #2 of the spaceport Howard's Hotel, a solidly middle-class hostelry favored by traveling salespeople and business types just in King City for the day. I was confronted at the door by a man in a red-and-black military uniform that featured a fur hat almost a meter high. I vaguely recalled the outfit from historical romances. He was rigidly at attention beside a guardhouse about the size of a coffin standing on end. He glanced at my faxed invitation, opened the door for me, and the familiar roar of a party in progress spilled into the hall.
Liz had managed a pretty good turn-out. Too bad she couldn't have afforded to hire a bigger hall. People were standing elbow to elbow, trying to balance tiny plates of olives and crackers with cheese and anchovy paste in one hand and paper cups of punch and champagne in the other while being jostled from all sides. I sidled my way to the food, as is my wont when it's free, and scanned it dubiously. UniBio set a better table, I must say. Drinks were being poured by two men in the most outrageous outfits. I won't even attempt to describe them. I later learned they were called Beefeaters, for reasons that will remain forever obscure to me.
Not that my own clothes were anything to shout about. She'd said semi-formal, so I could have gotten away with just the gray fedora and the press pass stuck in the brim. But upon reflection I decided to go with the whole silly ensemble, handing the baggy pants and double-breasted suit coat to the auto-valet with barely enough time for alterations. I left the seat and the legs loose and didn't button the coat; that was part of the look my guild, in its infinite wisdom, had voted on almost two hundred years ago when professional uniforms were being chosen. It had been taken from newspaper movies of the 1930's. I'd viewed a lot of them, and was amused at the image my fellow reporters apparently wanted to project at formal events: rumpled, aggressive, brash, impolite, wise-cracking, but with hearts o' gold when the goin' got tough. Sure, and it made yer heart proud ta be a reporter, by the saints. For a little fun, I'd worn a white blouse with a bunch of lac
e at the neck instead of the regulation ornamental noose known as a neck-tie. And I'd tied my hair up and stuffed it under the hat. In the mirror I'd looked just like Kate Hepburn masquerading as a boy, at least from the neck up. From there down the suit hung on me like a tent, but such was the cunning architecture of my new body that anything looked good on it. I'd saluted my image in the mirror: here's lookin' at you, Bobbie.
Liz spotted me and made her way toward me with a shout. She was already half looped. If her late mother had given her nothing else, she had seemingly inherited his taste for the demon rum. She embraced me and thanked me for coming, then swirled off again into the crowd. Well, I'd corner her later, after the ceremony, if she could still stand up by then.
What followed hasn't changed much in four or five hundred years. For almost an hour people kept arriving, including the hotel manager who had a hasty conference with Liz-concerning her credit rating, I expect-and then opened the connecting door to Suite #1, which relieved the pressure for a while. The food and champagne ran out, and was replenished. Liz didn't care about the cost. This was her day. It was your proto-typical daytime party.
