Steel Beach

by John Varley

  How much happiness could one person stand?

  ***

  I do believe in God, I do, I do, I do, because so many times in my life I've seen that He's out there, watching, keeping score. When you've just about reached a Zen state of pure acceptance-and the beauty of that night combined with the pleasant aches of work well-done and friends well-met and even the little fillip of two dogs you knew would be waiting for you the next morning… when that state approaches He sends a little rock down to fall in the road of your life.

  This was a literal rock, and I hit it just outside of town and it caused two spokes to break and the rim to buckle on my front wheel. I just missed a painful tumble into a patch of cactus. That was God again: it would have been too much, this was just to serve as a reminder.

  I thought about returning to town and waking the blacksmith, who I know would have been happy to work on the newfangled invention that was the talk of the town. But he'd be long abed, with his good wife and three children, and I decided not to bother him. I left it there beside the road. You can't steal a thing like that in a small town, how would you explain riding around on Hildy's bike? I walked the rest of the way and arrived not depressed, not really out of sorts, just a little deflated.

  I had stepped onto the front porch before the lamplight revealed a man sitting in the rocker there, not ten feet away from me.

  "Goodness," I said. Well, I'd taken to talking like that. "You gave me a start." I was a little nervous, but not frightened. Rape is rare, not unknown, in Luna, but in Texas…? He'd have to be a fool. All the exits are too well controlled, and hanging is legal. I held the lantern up to get a better look at him.

  He was a dapper fellow, about my height, with a nice face, twinkling eyes, a mustache. He wore a tweed double-breasted suit with a high wing collar and red silk cravat. On his feet were black and white canvas and leather Balmorals. A cane and a derby hat rested on the floor beside him. I didn't think I'd ever seen him before, but there was something in the way he sat.

  "How are you, Hildy?" he said. "Working late again?"

  "That's either Cricket, or her identical twin brother," I said. "What have you done to yourself?"

  "Well, I already had the mustache and I thought, 'What the hell?'"

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  And what happened to the girl we last saw speaking to an inhuman golem in a padded cell off the Leystrasse, hearing things no human ear was meant to hear, her insides all atremble? How came this quivering wreck, freshly tossed by the twin tempests of another botched suicide attempt and the CC's ham-fisted attempt to "cure" her, to her present tranquility? How did the young Modern butterfly with the ragged wings retromorphose into the plain but outwardly-stable Victorian caterpillar?

  She did it one day at a time.

  As I had hinted to Brenda, no matter how much the governing boards might say concerning the functions of the historical disneys, an unexpected and unmentioned side benefit they had provided was to work as sanctuaries-all right, as very big un-fenced asylums-for the societally and mentally shell-shocked. In Texas and the other places like it, we could cease our unfruitful baying at our several lunatic moons and, without therapy per se, retire to a quieter, gentler time. Living there was therapy in itself. For some, the prescription would have to be carried on forever; for others, an occasional dose was enough. It wasn't established yet which applied to me.

  The Texian had been a big step for me, and lo, I found it good. I was prevailed on to become a teacher, and that, too, was good. Learning to not only have friends, but to open up to them, to understand that a true friend wanted to hear my problems, my hopes and my fears, didn't happen overnight and still wasn't an accomplished fact, but I was getting there. The important thing was I was creating my new world one brick at a time, and so far, it was good.

  It was also, compared to my old life, boring as hell. Not to me, you understand; I found every new crayon drawing by one of my students an object of amazement. Each new trivial news story dug up by Charity made me as proud as if she were my own daughter. Publishing the Texian was so much more satisfying than working at the Nipple that I wondered how I'd labored there so long. It's just that, to an outsider, the attraction was a little hard to explain. Brenda found it all very dull. I fully expected Cricket to, as well. You may agree with them. This is why I've omitted almost seven months that could really be of interest only to my therapist, if I had one.

  Which all makes it sound as if I were well and truly cured. And if I was, how come I still woke up two or three times a week in the empty hours before dawn, drenched in sweat, heart hammering, a scream on my lips?

  ***

  "Why in heaven's name are you sitting out here?" I asked him. "It's getting chilly. Why didn't you go inside?"

  He just looked blankly at me, as if I'd said something foolish. To someone who hadn't spent time in Texas, I suppose it was. So I opened the door, showing him it hadn't been locked. You can bet he had never tried it himself.

  I struck a lucifer and went around the room lighting the kerosene lamps, then opened the door of the stove and lit the pile of pine shavings there. I added kindling until I had a small, hot fire, then filled the coffee pot from the brass spigot at the bottom of the tall ceramic water cooler and set it on the stove to boil. Cricket watched all these operations with interest, sitting at the table in one of my two kitchen chairs. His hat was on the table, but he still held on to his cane.

  I scooped coffee beans from the glass jar and put them in the grinder and started cranking it by hand. The room filled with the smell. When I had the right grind I dumped it into the basket and put it into the pot. Then I got a plate and the half of an apple pie sitting on the counter, cut him a huge slice, and set it before him with a fork and napkin. Only then did I sit down across from him, remove my hat, and put it next to his.

  He looked down at the pie as if curious as to the purpose and meaning of such a thing, hesitantly picked up his fork, and ate a bite. He looked all around the cabin again.

  "This is nice," he said. "Homey-like."

  "Rustic," I suggested. "Plain. Pioneering. Boeotian."

  "Texan," he summed up. He gestured with his fork. "Good pie."

  "Wait'll you taste the coffee."

  "I'm sure it'll be first-rate." He gestured again, this time at the room. "Brenda said you needed help, but I never imagined this."

  "She didn't say that."

  "No. What she said was, 'Hildy's smiling at children, and teaching them her card tricks.' I knew I had to get here as fast as I could."

  ***

  I can imagine his alarm. But why shouldn't Hildy smile at children? More important, why had she spent so much time not smiling at anyone? But the business about the cards was sure to worry Cricket. I never taught anyone my tricks.

  And now for the first of several digression…

  I can't simply gloss over those missing months with the explanation that you wouldn't be interested. You wouldn't, but certain things did happen, mostly of a negative nature, to get me from the CC to the kitchen table with Cricket, and it's worth relating a few of them to give a feel for my personal odyssey during that time.

  What I did was use my weekends on a Quest.

  Every Saturday I went to the Visitors Center and there I shed my secret identity as a mild-mannered reporter to become a penny-ante Diogenes, searching endlessly for an honest game. So far all I'd found were endless variations of the mechanic's grip, but I was undaunted. Look in the Yellow Files under Philosophers, Professional, and you'll get a printout longer than Brenda's arm. Don't even try Counselors or Therapists unless you have a wheelbarrow to cart away the paper. But that's what I was doing. Once out in the real world again, I spent my Saturdays sampling the various ways other people had found to get through the day, and the next day, and the next day.

  Of the major schools of thought, of the modern or trendy, I already knew a lot, and many of them I felt could be dispensed with. No need to attend a Flackite pep rally, for instan
ce. So I began with the classic cons.

  I've already said I'm a cynic. In spite of it, I made my best attempt to give each and every guru his day in court. But with the best will in the world it is impossible for me to present the final results as anything other than a short series of comedy blackouts. And that's how I spent my Saturdays.

  On Sundays, I went to church.

  ***

  It's not really proper to start supper with dessert, but in Texas one is expected to put some food in front of a guest within a few minutes of his crossing your threshold. The pie was the best thing close at hand. But I soon had a bowl of chili and a plate of cornbread in front of him. He dug in, and didn't seem to mind the sweat that soon beaded his forehead.

  "I thought you'd ride up on a horse," he said. "I kept listening for it. You surprised me, coming on foot."

  "You have any idea how much up-keep there is on a horse?"

  "Not the foggiest."

  "A lot, trust me. I ride a bicycle. I've got the finest Dursley Pedersen in Texas, with pneumatic tyres."

  "So where is it?" He reached for the pitcher and poured himself another glass of water, something everyone does when eating my chili.

  "Had a little accident. Were you waiting long?"

  "About an hour. I checked the schoolhouse but nobody was there."

  "I'm only there mornings. I have another job." I got a copy of tomorrow's Texian and handed it to him. He looked at the colophon, then at me, and started scanning it without comment.

  "How's your daughter doing? Lisa?"

  "She's fine. Only she wants to be called Buster now. Don't ask me why."

  "They go through stages like that. My students do, anyway. I did."

  "So did I."

  "Last time you said she was into that father thing. Is she still?"

  He made a gesture that took in his new body, and shrugged.

  "What do you think?"

  ***

  My researches turned up one listing that seemed an appropriate place to begin. This fellow was the only living practitioner of his craft, he vas ze zpitting image of Zigmunt Frrreud, unt he zpoke viz an aggzent zat zounded zomezing like zis. Freudian psychotherapy is not precisely debunked, of course, many schools use it as a foundation, merely throwing out this or that tenet since found to be based more on Mr. Freud's own hang-ups than any universal human condition.

  How would a strict Freudian handle the realities of Lunar society? I wondered. This is how:

  Ziggy had me recline on a lovely couch in an office that would have put Walter's to shame. He asked me what seemed to be the problem, and I talked for about ten minutes with him taking notes behind me. Then I stopped.

  "Very interesting," he said, after a moment. He asked me about my relationship with my mother, and that was good for another half hour of talk on my part. Then I stopped.

  "Very interesting," he said, after an even longer pause. I could hear his pen scratching on his note pad.

  "So what do you think, doc?" I asked, turning to crane my neck at him. "Is there any hope for me?"

  "I zink," he zaid, and that's enough of zat, "that you present a suitable case for therapy."

  "So what's my problem?"

  "It's far too early to tell. I'm struck by the incident you related between you and your mother when you were, what… fourteen? When she brought home the new lover you did not approve of."

  "I didn't approve of much of anything about her at that time. Plus, he was a jerk. He stole things from us."

  "Do you ever dream of him? Perhaps this theft you worry about was a symbolic one."

  "Could be. I seem to remember he stole Callie's best symbolic china service and my symbolic guitar."

  "Your hostility aimed at me, a father figure, might be simply transferred from your rage toward your absent father."

  "My what?"

  "The new lover… yes, it could be the real feeling you were masking was resentment at him for possessing a penis."

  "I was a boy at the time."

  "Even more interesting. And since then you've gone so far as to have yourself castrated… yes, yes, there is much here worth looking into."

  "How long do you think it will take?"

  "I would anticipate excellent progress in… three to five years."

  "Actually, no," I said. "I don't think I have any hope of curing you in that little time. So long, doc, it's been great."

  "You still have ten minutes of your hour. I bill by the hour."

  "If you had any sense, you'd bill by the month. In advance."

  ***

  "Of course, that wasn't the only reason I got the Change," Cricket said. "I'd been thinking about it for a while, and I thought I might as well see what it's like."

  I was clearing the table while he relaxed with a glass of wine-the Imbrium '22, a good vintage, poured into a bottle labeled "Whiz-Bang Red" and smuggled past the anachronism checkers. It was a common practice in Texas, where everyone agreed authenticity could be carried too far.

  "You mean this is your first time…?"

  "I'm younger than you are," he said. "You keep forgetting that."

  "You're right. How's it working out? Do you mind if I clean up?"

  "Go ahead. I'm liking it all right. With a little practice, I might even get good at it. Still feels funny, though. I'd like to meet the guy that invented testicles. What a joker."

  "They do seem sort of like a preliminary design, don't they?" I unfastened my skirt and folded it, then sat at the little table with the wavy mirror I used for dressing, make-up, and ablutions, and picked up my button hook. "Should I still be calling you Cricket? It's not a real masculine name."

  He was watching me struggling to un-hook the buttons on my shoes, which was understandable, as it is an unlikely process to one raised in an environment of bare feet or slip-on footwear. Or at least I thought that was what he was watching. Then I wondered if it was my knickers. They're nothing special: cotton, baggy, with elastic at mid-calf. But they have cute little pink ribbons and bows. This raised an interesting possibility.

  "I haven't changed it," he said. "But Lisa-Buster, dammit, wants me to."

  "Yeah? She could call you Jiminy." I had unbuttoned my shirtwaist blouse and laid it on the skirt. I doffed the bloomers and was working on the buttons of the combinations-another loose cotton item fashion has happily forgotten-before I looked up and had to laugh at the expression on his face.

  "I hit it, didn't I?" I said.

  "You did, but I won't answer to it. I'm considering Jim, or maybe Jimmy, but… what you said, that's right out. What's wrong with Cricket for a man, anyway?"

  "Not a thing. I'll continue to call you Cricket." I stepped out of the combinations and tossed them aside.

  "Jesus, Hildy!" Cricket exploded. "How long does it take you to get out of all that stuff?"

  "Not nearly as long as it takes to put it on. I'm never quite sure I have it all in the right order."

  "That's a corset, isn't it?"

  "That's right." Actually, he was almost right. We'd gotten down to the best items by now, no more cotton. The thing he was staring at could be bought-had been bought-in a specialty shop on the Leystrasse catering to people with a particular taste formerly common, now rare, and was not to be confused with the steel, whalebone, starch and canvas contraptions Victorian women tortured themselves with. It had elastic in it, and there the resemblance ended. It was pink and had frills around the edges and black laces in back. I pulled the pin holding my hair up, shook my head to let it fall. "Actually, you can help me with it. Could you loosen the laces for me?" I waited, then felt his hands fumbling with them.

  "How do you handle this in the morning?" he griped.

  "I have a girl come in." But not really. What I did was run my finger down the pressure seams in front and bingo. So if removing it would have been as easy as that-and it would have been-why ask for help? You're way ahead of me, aren't you.

  "I have to view this as pathology," he said, sitting back down
as I forced the still-tight garment down over my hips and added it to the pile. "How did you ever get into all this foolishness?"

  I didn't tell him, but it was one piece at a time. The Board didn't care what you wore under your clothes as long as you looked authentic on the outside. But I'd grown interested in the question all women ask when they see the things their grandmothers wore: how the hell did they do it?

  I don't have a magic answer. I've never minded heat; I grew up in the Jurassic Era, Texas was a breeze compared to the weather brontos liked. The real corset, which I tried once, was too much. The rest wasn't so bad, once you got used to it.

  So how I did it was easy. As to why… I don't know. I liked the feeling of getting into all that stuff in the morning. It felt like becoming someone else, which seemed a good idea since the self I'd been lately kept doing foolish things.

  "It makes it easier to write for my paper if I dress for the part," I finally told him.

  "Yeah, what about this?" he said, brandishing the copy of the Texian at me. He ran his finger down the columns. "'Farm Report,' in which I'm pleased to learn that Mr. Watkins' brown mare foaled Tuesday last, mother and daughter doing fine. Imagine my relief. Or this, where you tell me the corn fields up by Lonesome Dove will be in real trouble if they don't get some rain by next week. Did it slip your mind that the weather's on a schedule in here?"

  "I never read it. That would be cheating."

  "'Cheating,' she says. The only thing in here that sounds like you is this Gila Monster column, at least that gets nasty."