Steel Beach

by John Varley

  The crater's not actually full, it just looks that way from the west rim.

  "Over there," Brenda said. "That's where I said I'd meet Liz."

  I saw a speck on the horizon, also sitting on the rim.

  "How about letting me drive?" I asked.

  "You can drive?" It wasn't an unreasonable question; most Lunarians can't.

  "In my wild youth, I drove the Equatorial Race. Eleven thousand klicks, very little of it level." No point in adding I'd blown the transmission a quarter of the way through.

  "And I was lecturing you on how to handle a rover. Why don't you ever shut me up, Hildy?"

  "Then I'd lose half of my amusing stories."

  I switched the controls over to the British side of the car and took off. It had been many years since I'd driven. It was lots of fun. The rover had a good suspension; I only left the ground two or three times, and the gyros kept us from turning over. When I saw her gripping the dash I throttled back.

  "You'd never make a race driver. This is smooth."

  "I never wanted to be a race driver. Or a corpse."

  ***

  "I feel like a Girl Scout," I told Brenda as I helped her spread out the tent.

  "What's wrong with that? I earned all the surface pioneering merit badges."

  "Nothing wrong. I was one, too, but that was ninety years ago."

  She wasn't nearly that far removed from scouting, and she still took it seriously. Where I'd have just pulled the rip cord and let it go at that, she was a fanatic about saving energy, and ran a line from the rover's solar panel to the tent's power supply, as if the reactor wouldn't last a fortnight on its own. When the tent was arranged to her satisfaction she pulled the cord and it shuddered and flopped as it filled with air, and in ten seconds we had a five-meter transparent hemisphere… which promptly frosted up inside.

  She got on her knees and crawled into the igloo-type lock and I zipped it behind her to save her squirming around, and she told me this model had automatic zippers, so there had been progress since my childhood. She fiddled with the air controls while I stacked blankets and pillows and thermoses and the rest of our gear in the lock-got to get it well-packed, don't want to waste air by cycling the lock too much-then I stood around outside while she brought it all in and got the temperature and pressure and humidity adjusted. When I got in and took off my helmet it was still on the cool side. I wrote my name in the frost like I remembered doing on long-ago camping trips; it soon melted, and the dew was absorbed… and the dome seemed to vanish.

  "It's been too long," I said. "I'm glad you brought me here."

  For once she knew exactly what I meant. She stopped her fussing around and stood with me and we just looked around without saying anything.

  Any beauty on Luna is going to be a harsh sort of beauty. There's nothing benevolent or comforting to see anywhere-much like West Texas. This was the best way to see it, in a tent invisible to our eyes, as if we were standing on a black circular pad of plastic with nothing between us and vacuum.

  It was also the best time of day to see it; the Lunar Day, I mean. The sun was very close to the horizon, the shadows were almost infinitely long. Which helped, because half our vista was of the biggest garbage dump on the planet. There's a funny thing about shadows like that. If you've never seen snow, go to Pennsylvania the next time they've scheduled it and watch how snow can transform the most mundane-even ugly-scene into a magical landscape. Sunlight on the surface is like that. It's hard and bright as diamond, it blasts everything it touches and yet it does no damage; nothing moves, the billion facets of dark and light make every ordinary object into a hard-edged jewel.

  We didn't look west; the light was too dazzling. To the south we saw the rolling land falling away to our right, the endless heaps of garbage to the left. East was looking right out over Delambre, and north was the hulk of the Robert A. Heinlein, almost a mile of derelict might-have-been starship.

  "You think they'll have any trouble finding us?" Brenda asked.

  "Liz and Cricket? I wouldn't think so. Not with the old Heinlein over there. How could you miss it?"

  "That's what I thought, too."

  We set about little domestic chores, inflating the furniture, spreading a few rugs. She showed me how to set up the curtain that turned the tent into two not-very-private rooms, how to operate the little campstove. While we were doing that, the show began. Not to worry; it was going to be a long show.

  I had to admit the artistic director had done well. This was to be a commemoration of the billions dead on Earth, right? And at the latitude of Armstrong Park, the Earth would be directly overhead, right? And if you start the show at sundown, you'll have a half-Earth in the sky. So why not make the Earth the center and theme of your sky show?

  By fudging just a little you can begin the show when the old International Dateline is facing Luna. Now picture it: as the Earth turns, one by one the vanished nations of Old Earth emerge into the sunlight of a new day. And as each one appears…

  We were bathed in the red light of the flag of the Siberian Republic, a rectangle one hundred kilometers long, hanging above us at a height sufficient to blot out half the sky.

  "Wow," Brenda said. Her mouth was hanging open.

  "Double wow," I said, and closed my own mouth. The flag hung there almost a minute, burning brightly, then sputtered out. We hurried to get Brenda's boombox turned on, hung the big speakers on each side of the tent, and were in time to hear the opening strains of "God Defend New Zealand" as the Kiwi flag unfurled above us.

  That's how it was to be for eighteen hours.

  When Liz arrived she told us how it was done. The flag was a mesh construction stuffed into a big container and blasted up from one of the pyro bases, in Baylor-A, about forty klicks south of us, and Hyapatia and Torricelli, to the east. When the shell reached the right height it burst and rockets spread it out and it was set afire by radio control. Neat.

  How do fireworks burn in a vacuum? Don't ask me. But I know rocket fuels carry an oxidizer, so I guess it was some chemical magic like that. However they did it, it knocked our socks off, me and Brenda, no more than fifty clicks from the big firebase in Baylor, much closer than the poor hicks in Armstrong, who probably thought they were getting one heck of a show. And who cares if, from our vantage, the flags were distorted into trapezoids? I sure didn't.

  Brenda turned out to be a fountain of information about the show.

  "They didn't figure it made sense to give a country like Vanuatu equal time with, say, Russia," she said (we were looking at the ghastly flag of Vanuatu at the time, listening to its improbable national anthem). "So the major countries, ones with a lot of history, they'll get more of a pageant. Like the Siberian Republic used to be part of some other country-"

  "The U.S.S.R.," I supplied.

  "Right. Says so right here." She had a massive souvenir program spread out before us. "So they'll do more flags for that-the Tsarist flag, historical stuff-"

  "-and play the 'Internationale.'"

  "-and folk themes, like what we heard from New Zealand."

  They were telling us most of that on a separate radio channel, giving a history of each country, pitched at an illiterate level. I turned it off, preferring just the music, and Brenda didn't object. I'd have turned off the television, too-Brenda had pasted a big screen to the south side of the tent-but she seemed to enjoy the scenes of revelry from Armstrong and all the other celebrations in all the major Lunar cities, so what the hell.

  Get out an Earth globe and you'll quickly spot the major flaw in the Earth-rotational program. For the first six hours only a few dozen countries will swing into view. Even if you give the entire history of China and Japan, there's going to be some gaps to fill, and how much can you say about Nauru and the Solomon Islands? On the other hand, when dawn broke over Africa and Europe the pyrotechs were going to be busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.

  Not to worry. When they ran out of flags, that's when th
ey trotted out the heavy artillery.

  From the first appearance of that red ensign, the sky was never dark.

  There were the conventional shells, starbursts in all the colors of the rainbow. Without air to impede their flight they could be placed with pinpoint precision-one thing Lunarians understand is ballistics. They were also perfectly symmetrical, for the same reason.

  You want more? In the vacuum, it was possible to produce effects never seen on Earth. Huge gas canisters could produce a thin atmosphere, locally, temporarily, upon which tricks of ionization could be played. We were treated to auroral curtains, washes of color in which the entire sky turned blue or red or yellow, then flickered magically. Shrapnel shells filled the sky with spinning discs no bigger than a coin, which were then swept by searchlights to twinkle as no stars ever had on Luna, then exploded by lasers.

  Still not satisfied? How about a few nukes? Brenda's program said there would be over one hundred special fission shells, an average of one every ten minutes for the duration of the show. These were detonated in orbit and used to propel literally thousands of regular pyro shells into bursts over a thousand klicks wide. The first one went off at the end of the Vanuatu National Anthem, and it rattled our teeth, and then it went on exploding, and exploding, and exploding. Glorious!

  And don't think I didn't hear that! You're complaining that sound doesn't travel in a vacuum. Of course it doesn't, but radio waves do, and you obviously never listened to Brenda's top-of-the-line boombox cranked up to full volume. Those poor folks who watch fireworks in an atmosphere have to wait for the sound to arrive, too, and they get a chance to brace for it; we got it instantaneously, no warning, a flash of hurting light and a ka-BOOOOOOOM!

  Sometimes wretched excess is the only thing that will do.

  ***

  "They say this place is haunted."

  We'd just been treated to the national anthem of Belau and its flag had faded from the sky (a big yellow circle on a blue field, if you're keeping score at home), and two things had dawned on us. One, you need a breather from wretched excess from time to time, or it gets… well, wretched. Between us we'd emitted not even one "wow" at the last three nukes, and I was thinking of suggesting we switch to Top 40 for an hour or so. Somehow I thought I could survive missing the playing of Negara Ku (My Country; Mayalsia) and Sanrasoen Phra Barami ("Hail to our King! Blessings on our King! Hearts and minds we bow/ To Your Majesty now!" words by H.R.H. Prince Narisaranuvadtivongs). And two, Liz and Cricket were three hours late.

  "Who's they?" I asked, munching on a drumstick of Hildy's Finest WesTex Fried Chicken. Hunger had overcome the demands of politeness; Brenda had miked a few pieces, and the hell with Liz and Cricket. I was eyeing the beer cooler as well, but neither of us wanted to get too much of a head start.

  "You know," she said. "'They.' Your primary news source."

  "Oh, that 'they.'"

  "Seriously, though, I've heard from several people who've come out to visit the old Heinlein. They say they've seen ghosts."

  "Walter put you up to this, didn't he," I said.

  "I've talked to him about it. He thinks there may be a story in it."

  "Sure there is, but there's no need to come out here and interview a spook. That kind of story, you just make it up. Walter must have told you that."

  "He did. But this isn't your ordinary filler story, Hildy, I mean it. The people I interviewed, some of them were scared."

  "Give me a break."

  "I've been coming out here and bringing a good camera. I thought I might get a picture."

  "Come on. What do you think the Nipple's photo department is for? Dummying up just that kind of pic, that's what."

  She didn't say anything about it for a while, and we watched several more ghost flags in the sky. I found myself eyeing the Heinlein. And no, I'm not superstitious, just godawful curious.

  "Is that why you've been camping out so much?" I asked. "The story's not worth it."

  "Camping… oh, no," and she laughed. "I've camped out a lot all my life. I find if very… peaceful out here."

  Another long silence went by, or as silent as it could be with nukes exploding outside and her boombox turned down to a low rumble. At last she got up and walked to stand by the invisible plastic wall of the tent. She leaned her head against it. And by the rockets red glare, she told me something I'd have been a lot happier not hearing.

  "Ever since I met you," she began, "I've thought I could tell you something I've never told anybody else. Not a soul." She looked at me. "If you don't want to hear it, please say so now, 'cause if I get started I don't think I'll be able to stop."

  If you could have told her to shut up, I don't want to know you. I didn't need this, I didn't want it, but when a friend asks something like that of you, you say yes, that's all there is to it.

  "Make it march," I said, and glanced at my watch. "I don't want to miss the Laotian National Anthem."

  She smiled, and looked back out over the landscape.

  "When you first met me… well, later, that first time I came out to Texas to see you, you probably noticed something unusual about me."

  "You're probably referring to your lack of genitalia. I'm observant that way."

  "Yes. Did you ever wonder about it."

  Had I? Not much actually. "Ah… I guess I thought it was something religious, or cultural, something your parents believed. I remember thinking it wasn't a nice thing to do to a child, but not my business."

  "Yes. Not a nice thing to do. And it did have to do with my parents. With my father."

  "I don't know a lot about fathers," I said, still hoping she'd change her mind. "I'm like most; mom never told me who he was."

  "I knew mine. He lived with me and my mother. He started raping me when I was about six. I've never had the nerve to ask my mother if she knew about it, I didn't even know there was anything wrong with it, I thought it was what I was supposed to do." Standing there, looking out at the surface, the words spilling out of her but calm, calm, no hint of tears. "I don't know how I learned it wasn't something my friends did, maybe I started to talk about it and picked up something, some attitude, some beginning of horror, something that made me shut up about it to this day. But it went on for years and I thought about turning him in, I know that's what you're wondering, why didn't I do it, but he was my father and he loved me and I thought I loved him. But I was ashamed of us, and when I turned twelve I went and had… it… removed, closed up, eradicated so he couldn't put it in me anymore, and I know now the Minor's Referee who let me get it done in spite of dad's objections had figured out what was going on because she kept saying I should bring charges, but all I wanted was for him to stop. And he did, he never touched me from that day on, hardly spoke to me, for that matter. So I don't know why it is that some females prefer the company of other females, but that's why for me, it's because I can't deal with males, only when I met you, well, not too long after I met you, I fell badly, madly in love with you. Only you were a boy, which drove me crazy. Please don't worry about it, Hildy, I've got it under control, I know there's things that just can't happen, and you and me are one of them. I've heard you talking about Cricket and I ought to be jealous because she and I were making love, but it was just for fun, and besides Cricket's a boy now, too, and I wish you all the happiness. So my secret's out, and another one is I arranged it so you and I would be alone for a little while out here, the place I always come, always came when I wanted to get away from him. This is rotten and I know it, but I've thought about it a long time and I can live with it. I won't cry and I won't beg, but I'd like to make love to you just one time. I know you're hetero, everyone I've talked to says that about you, but what I'm hoping is it's just a preference, you're a Changer, you've made love to women before, but maybe it's something you can't do when you're female. Or maybe you don't want to or think it's a bad idea, and that's fine, too. I just had to ask, that's all. I know I sound real needy but I'm not, not that way; I'll live either way, and I hop
e we'll still be friends, either way. There. I didn't know if I'd have the guts to say it all, but I did, and I feel better already."

  I have a short list of things I never do, and right near the top is surrendering to emotional blackmail. If there's a worse kind of sex than the charity fuck, I haven't heard about it. And her words could be read as the worst kind of whipped-puppy appeal and dammit, okay, she did have a right to act like a whipped puppy but I hate whipped puppies, I want to kick them for letting themselves be whipped… only the words didn't come out like that, not out of that straight-backed, dry-eyed beanpole over there against the blazing sky. She'd grown since I met her, and I thought this was part of the growth. Why she'd picked me to unload on I don't know, but the way she'd done it flattered me rather than obligated me.

  So I told her no. Or would have, in a perfect world where I actually follow my short list of things I never do. What I did instead was get up and put my arms around her from behind and say:

  "You handled that very well. If you'd cried, I'd have kicked your butt all the way to King City."

  "I won't cry. Not about that, not anymore. And not when it's over."

  And she didn't.

  ***

  Brenda had arranged for our moment of privacy by not telling me Cricket had been assigned to cover the festivities at Armstrong Park. After our little romantic interlude-quite pleasant, thanks for asking-she confessed her ruse, and also that he was going to play hooky after the first few hours and should be arriving any minute, so let's get dressed, okay?

  I can't imagine why I worried about getting a head start on Liz. She got a head start on all of us, drinking on her way out to Armstrong and all the way back, as if Cricket needed any more causes for alarm.