Steel Beach

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I've read about hangovers. You just about have to believe those people were exaggerating. If only a tenth of the things written about them were true, I have no desire to experience one. The hangover was cured long before I was born, just a simple chemical matter, really, no tough science involved. I'd sometimes wondered if that was a good idea. There's an almost biblical belief deep in the human psyche that we should pay in some way for our over-indulgences. But when I think that, my rational side soon takes over. Might as well wish for the return of the hemorrhoid.

When I woke up the next morning, my mouth tasted good.

Too good.

"CC, on line," quoth I.

"What can I do for you?"

"What's with the peppermint?"

"I thought you liked peppermint. I can change the flavor."

"There's nothing wrong with peppermint qua peppermint. It's just passing strange to wake up with my mouth tasting like anything but… well, it wouldn't mean anything to you, I don't guess taste is one of your talents, but take my word for it, it's vile."

"You asked me to work on that. I did."

"Just like that?"

"Why not?"

I was about to answer, but Fox stirred in his sleep and turned over, so I got out of bed and went into the bathroom. I had shaken out a tooth-cleaning pill, then I looked at it sitting there in my hand.

"Do I need this, then?"

"No. It's gone the way of the toothbrush."

"And science marches on. You know, I'm used to what they call future shock, but I'm not used to being the cause of it."

"Humans usually are the cause of the new inventions."

"You said that."

"But you can never tell when a human will take the time to work on a particular problem. Now, I have no talent for asking questions like that. As you noted, my mouth never tastes bad in the morning, so why should I? But I have a lot of excess capacity, and when a question like that is asked, I often tinker with it and sometimes come up with a solution. In this case, I synthesized a nanobot that goes after the things that would normally rot in your mouth while you are sleeping, and changes them into things that taste good. They also clean away plaque and tartar and have a beneficial effect on gums."

"I'm afraid to ask how you slipped this stuff to me."

"It's in the water supply. You don't need much of it."

"So every Lunarian is waking up today and tasting peppermint?"

"It comes in six delicious flavors."

"Are you writing your own ad campaigns now? Do me a favor; don't tell anyone this is my fault."

I got into the shower and it turned on, gradually warming to just a degree below the hottest I could stand. Don't ever say anything about showers, Hildy, I cautioned myself. The goddam CC might find a way to clean the human hide without them, and I think I'd go mad without my morning shower. I'm a singer in the shower. Lovers have told me I do this with indifferent esthetic effect, but it pleases me. As I soaped myself I thought about a nanobot-infested world.

"CC. What would happen if all those tiny little robots were taken out of my body?"

"Doing it would be impractical, to say the least."

"Hypothetically."

"You would be hypothetically dead within a year."

I dropped the soap. I don't know what answer I had expected, but it hadn't been that.

"Are you serious?"

"You asked. I replied."

"Well… shit. You can't just leave it lying there."

"I suppose not. Then let me list the reasons in order. First, you are prone to cancer. Billions of manufactured organisms work night and day seeking out and eating pinpoint tumors throughout your body. They find one almost every day. If left unchecked, they would soon eat you alive. Second, Alzheimer's Disease."

"What the hell is that?"

"A syndrome associated with aging. Simply put, it eats away at your brain cells. Most human beings, upon reaching their hundredth birthday in a natural state, would have contracted it. This is an example of the reconstructive work constantly going on in your body. Failing brain cells are excised and duplicated with healthy ones so the neural net is not disrupted. You would have forgotten your name and how to find your way home years ago; the disease started showing up about the time you went to work at the Nipple."

"Hah! Maybe those things didn't do as good a job as you thought. That would go a long way toward explaining… never mind. There's more?"

"Lung disease. The air in the warrens is not actually healthy for human life. Things get concentrated, things that could be cleaned from the air are not, because replacing lungs is so much cheaper and simpler than cleaning up the air. You could live in a disneyland to offset this; I must filter the air much more rigorously in there. As it is, several hundred alveoli are re-built in your lungs every day. Without the nanobots, you'd soon begin to miss them."

"Why didn't anyone ever tell me about all this?"

"What does it matter? If you'd researched it you could have found out; it's not a secret."

"Yeah, but… I thought those kind of things had been engineered out of the body. Genetically."

"A popular misconception. Genes are certainly manipulable, but they've proved resistant to some types of changes, without… unacceptable alterations in the gestalt, the body, they produce and define."

"Can you put that more plainly?"

"It's difficult. It can be explained in terms of some very complicated mathematical theories having to do with chaotic effects and chemical holography. There's often no single gene for this or that characteristic, good or bad. It's more of an interference pattern produced by the overlapping effects of a number of genes, sometimes a very large number. Tampering with one produces unintended side-effects, and tampering with them all is often impossible without producing unwanted changes. Bad genes are bound up this way as often as good ones. In your case, if I eradicated the faulty genes that insist on producing cancers in your body, you'd no longer be Hildy. You'd be a healthier person, but not a wiser one, and you'd lose a lot of abilities and outlooks that, counterproductive though they may be in a purely practical sense, I suspect you treasure."

"What makes me me."

"Yes. You know there are many things I can change about you without affecting your… soul is the simplest word to use, though it's a hazy one."

"It's the first one you've used that I understand." I chewed on that for a while, shutting off the shower and stepping out, dripping wet, reaching for a towel, drying myself.

"It doesn't make sense to me that things like cancer should be in the genes. It sounds contra-survival."

"From an evolutionary viewpoint, anything that doesn't kill you before you've become old enough to reproduce is irrelevant to species survival. There's even a philosophic point of view that says cancer and things like it are good for the race. Overpopulation can be a problem to a very successful species. Cancer gets the old ones out of the way."

"They're not getting out the way now."

"No. It will be a problem someday."

"When?"

"Don't worry about it. Ask me again at the Tricentennial. As a preliminary measure, large families are now being discouraged, the direct opposite of the ethic that prevailed after the Invasion."

I wanted to hear more, but I noticed the time, and had to hustle to get ready in time to catch my train.

Tranquility Base is by far the biggest tourist attraction on Luna, and the reason is its historical significance, since it is the spot where a human foot first trod another planet. Right? If you thought that, maybe I could interest you in some prime real estate on Ganymede with a great view of the volcano. The real draw at Tranquility is just over the horizon and goes by the name of Armstrong Park. Since the park is within the boundaries of Apollo Planetary Historical Preserve, the Lunar Chamber of Commerce can boast that X million people visit the site of the first Lunar landing every year, but the ads feature the roller coaster, not the LEM.

A good number of those tourists do find the time to ride the train over to the Base itself and spend a few minutes gazing at the forlorn little lander, and an hour hurrying through the nearby museum, where most of the derelict space hardware from 1960 to the Invasion is on display. Then the kids begin to whine that they're bored, and by then the parents probably are, too, and it's back to the land of over-priced hot dogs and not-so-cheap thrills.

You can't take a train directly to the base. No accident, that. It dumps you at the foot of the thirty-story explosion of lights that is the sign for and entrance to the Terminal Seizure, what the ads call "The Greatest Sphincter-Tightener in the Known Universe." I got on it once, against my better judgment, and I guarantee it will show you things they didn't tell you about in astronaut school. It's a twenty-minute MagLev, six-gee, free trajectory descent into the tenth circle of Hell that guarantees one blackout and seven gray hairs or your money back. It's actually two coasters-the Grand Mal and the Petit Mal-one of them obviously for wimps. They are prepared to hose out the Grand Mal cars after every ride. If you understand the attraction of that, please don't come to my home to explain it to me. I'm armed, and considered dangerous.

I walked as quickly as I could past the sign-30,000,000 (Count 'Em!) Thirty Million Lights!-and noticed the two-hour line for the Grand Mal ride was cleverly concealed from the ticket booth. I made it to the shuttle train, having successfully avoided the blandishments of a thousand hucksters selling everything from inflatable Neil dolls to talking souvenir pencil sharpeners to put a point on your souvenir pencils. I boarded the train, removed a hunk of cotton candy from a seat, and sat. I was wearing a disposable paper jumper, so what the hell?

The Base itself is an area large enough to play a game of baseball/6. Those guys never got very far from their ship, so it made no sense to preserve any more of the area. It is surrounded by a stadium-like structure, un-roofed, that is four levels of viewing area with all the windows facing inward. On top is an un-pressurized level.

I elbowed my way through the throngs of camera-toting tourists from Pluto and made it to the suit rental counter. Oh, dear.

If I ever had to choose one sex to be for the rest of my life, I would be female. I think the body is better-designed, and the sex is a little better. But there is one thing about the female body that is distinctly inferior to the male-and I've talked to others about this, both Changers and dedicated females, and ninety-five percent agree with me-and that is urination. Males are simply better at it. It is less messy, the position is more dignified, and the method helps develop hand-eye coordination and a sense of artistic expression, a la writing your name in the snow.

But what the hell, right? It's never really much of an annoyance… until you go to rent a p-suit.

Almost three hundred years of engineering have come up with three basic solutions to the problem: the catheter, suction devices, and… oh, dear lord, the diaper. Some advocate a fourth way: continence. Try it the next time you go on a twelve-hour hike on the surface. The catheter was by far the best. It is painless, as advertised… but I hate the damn thing. It just feels wrong. Besides, like the suckers, they get dislodged. Next time you need a laugh, watch a woman trying to get her UroLator back in place. It could start a new dance craze.

I've never owned a p-suit. Why spend the money, when you need it once a year? I've rented a lot of them, and they all stank. No matter how they are sterilized, some odors of the previous occupant will linger. It's bad enough in a man's suit, but for real gut-wrenching stench you have to put on the female model. They all use the suction method, with a diaper as a back-up. At a place like Tranquility, where the turnover is rapid and the help likely to be under-paid, unconcerned, and slipshod, some of the niceties will be overlooked from time to time. I was once handed a suit that was still wet.

I got into this one and sniffed cautiously; not too bad, though the perfume was cheap and obvious. I switched it on and let the staff put it through a perfunctory safety check, and remembered the other thing I didn't like about the suction method. All that air flowing by can chill the vulva something fierce.

There were surgical methods of improving the interface, but I found them ugly, and they didn't make sense unless your work took you outside regularly. The rest of us just had to breathe shallowly and bear it, and try not to drink too much coffee before an excursion.

The air lock delivered me onto the roof, which was not crowded at all. I found a place at the rail far from anyone else, and waited. I turned off my suit radio, all but the emergency beacon.

I said, "CC, what do I get out of it?"

The CC is pretty good at picking up a conversation hours, weeks, and even years old, but the question was pretty vague. He took a stab at it.

"You mean the morning mouth preparation?"

"Yeah. I thought it up. You did the work, but then you gave it away without consulting me. Shouldn't there be a way to make some money out of it?"

"It's defined as a health benefit, so its production cost will be added to the health tax all Lunarians pay, plus a small profit, which will go to you. It won't make you rich."

"And no one gets to choose. They get it whether they like it or not."

"If they object, I have an antibot available. No one has so far."

"Still sounds like a subversive plot to me. If the drinking water ain't pure, what is?"

"Hildy, there's so many things in the King City municipal water you could practically lift it with a magnet."

"All for our own good."

"You seem to be in a sour mood."

"Why should I be? My mouth tastes wonderful."

"If you're interested, the approval ratings on this are well over ninety-nine percent. The favorite flavor, however is Neutral-with-a-Hint-of-Mint. And an unforeseen side benefit is that it works all day, cleaning your breath."

He'd beaten halitosis, I realized, glumly. How did I feel about that? Shouldn't I be rejoicing? I recalled the way Liz's breath had smelled last night, that sour reek of gin. Should a drunk's breath smell like a puppy's tongue? I was sure as hell being a crabby old woman about this, even I could see that. But hell, I was an old woman, and often crabby. I'd found that as I got older, I was less tolerant of change, for good or ill.

"How did you hear me?" I asked, before I could get too gloomy thinking about a forever-changing world.

"The radio you switched off is suit-to-suit. Your suit also monitors your vital signs, and transmits them if needed. Using your access voice is defined as an emergency call, not requiring aid."

"So I'm never out from under the protective umbrella of your eternal vigilance."

"It keeps you safe," he said, and I told him to go away.

When Armstrong and Aldrin came in peace for all mankind, it was envisioned that their landing site, in the vacuum of space, would remain essentially unchanged for a million years, if need be. Never mind that the exhaust of lift-off knocked the flag over and tore a lot of the gold foil on the landing stage. The footprints would still be there. And they are. Hundreds of them, trampling a crazy pattern in the dust, going away from the lander, coming back, none of them reaching as far as the visitors' gallery. There are no other footprints to be seen. The only change the museum curators worked at the site were to set the flag back up, and suspend an ascent-stage module about a hundred feet above the landing stage, hanging from invisible wires. It's not the Apollo 11 ascent stage; that one crash-landed long ago.

Things are often not what they seem.

Nowhere in the free literature or the thousands of plaques and audio-visual displays in the museum will you hear of the night one hundred and eighty years ago when ten members of the Delta Chi Delta fraternity, Luna University Chapter, came around on their cycles. This was shortly after the Invasion, and the site was not guarded as it is now. There had just been a rope around the landing area, not even a visitors' center; post-Invasion Lunarians didn't have time for luxuries like that.

The Delts tipped the lander over and dragged it about twenty feet. Their cycles wiped out most of the footprints. They were going to steal the flag and take it back to their dorm, but one of them fell off his mount, cracked his faceplate, and went to that great pledge party in the sky. P-suits were not as safe then as they are now. Horseplay in a p-suit was not a good idea.

But not to worry. Tranquility Base was one of the most documented places in the history of history. Tens of thousands of photos existed, including very detailed shots from orbit. Teams of selenolography students spent a year restoring the Base. Each square meter was scrutinized, debates raged about the order in which footprints had been laid down, then two guys went out there and tromped around with replica Apollo moonboots, each step measured by laser, and were hauled out on a winch when they were through. Presto! An historical re-creation passing as the real thing. This is not a secret, but very few people know about it. Look it up.

I felt a hand flip the radio switch on my suit back on.

"Fancy meeting you here," Liz said.

"Quite a coincidence," I said, thinking about the CC listening in. She joined me, leaning on the railing and looking out over the plain. Behind the far wall of the round visitors' gallery I could see thousands of people looking toward us through the glass.

"I come here a lot," she said. "Would you travel a half-million miles in a tinfoil toy like that?"

"I wouldn't go half a meter in it. I'd rather travel by pogo stick."

"They were real men in those days. Have you ever thought about it? What it must have been like? They could barely turn around in that thing. One of them made it back with half the ship blown up."

"Yeah. I have thought about it. Maybe not as much as you."

"Think about this, then. You know who the real hero was? In my opinion? Good old Mike Collins, the poor sap who stayed in orbit. Whoever designed this operation didn't think it out. Say something went wrong, say the lander crashes and these two die instantly. There's Collins up in orbit, all by himself. How are you gonna deal with that? No ticker-tape parade for Mike. He gets to attend the memorial service, and spend the rest of his life wishing he'd died with them. He gets to be a national goat, is what he gets."

"I hadn't thought of that."

"So things go right-and they did, though I'll never understand how-so who does the Planetary Park get named after? Why, the guy who flubbed his 'first words' from the surface."

"I thought that was a garbled transmission."

"Don't you believe it. 'Course, if I'd had two billion people listening in, I might have fucked it up, too. That part was probably scarier than the thought of dying, anyway, having everybody watching you die, and hoping that if it did go rotten, it wouldn't be your fault. This little exercise cost twenty, thirty billion dollars, and that was back when a billion was real money."

It was still real money to me, but I let her ramble on. This was her show; she'd brought me here, knowing only that I was interested in telling her something in a place where the CC couldn't overhear. I was in her hands.

"Let's go for a walk," she said, and started off. I hurried to catch up with her, followed her down several flights of stairs to the surface.

You can cover a lot of ground on the surface in a fairly short time. The best gait is a hop from the ball of the foot, swinging each leg out slightly to the side. There's no point in jumping too high, it just wastes energy.

I know there are still places on Luna where the virgin dust stretches as far as the eye can see. Not many, but a few. The mineral wealth of my home planet is not great, and all the interesting places have been identified and mapped from orbit, so there's little incentive to visit some of the more remote regions. By remote, I mean far from the centers of human habitation; any spot on Luna is easily reachable by a lander or crawler.

Everywhere I'd ever been on the surface looked much like the land around Tranquility Base, covered with so many tracks you wondered where the big crowd had gone, since there was likely to be not a single soul in sight but whatever companions you were traveling with. Nothing ever goes away on Luna. It has been continuously inhabited by humans for almost two and a half centuries. Every time someone has taken a stroll or dropped an empty oxygen tank the evidence is still there, so a place that got two visitors every three or four years looks like hundreds of people have gone by just a few minutes before. Tranquility got considerably more than that. There was not a square millimeter of undisturbed dust, and the litter was so thick it had been kicked into heaps here and there. I saw empty beer cans with labels a hundred and fifty years old lying next to some they were currently selling in Armstrong Park.

After a bit some of that thinned out. The tracks tended to group themselves into impromptu trails. I guess humans tend to follow the herd, even when the herd is gone and the land is so flat it doesn't matter where you go.

"You left too early last night," Liz said, the radio making it sound as if she was standing beside me when I could see her twenty meters in front. "There was some excitement."

"I thought it was pretty exciting while I was there."

"Then you must have seen the Duke of Bosnia tangling with the punchbowl."

"No, I missed that. But I tangled with him earlier."

"That was you? Then it's your fault. He was in a foul mood. Apparently you didn't mark him enough; he figures if he hasn't lost a kilo or two of flesh after pounding the sheets, somebody just wasn't trying."

"He didn't complain."

"He wouldn't. I swear, I think I'm related to him, but that man is so stupid, he hasn't got the brains God gave a left-handed screwdriver. After you went home he got drunk as a waltzing pissant and decided somebody had put poison in the punch, so he tipped it over and picked it up and started banging people over the head with it. I had to come over and coldcock him."

"You do give interesting parties."

"Ain't it the truth? But that's not what I was gonna tell you about. We were having so much fun we completely forgot about the gifts, so I gathered everybody around and started opening them."

"You get anything nice?"

"Well, a few had the sense to tape the receipt to the box. I'll clear a little money on that. So I got to one that said it was from the Earl of Donegal, which should have tipped me off, but what do I know about the goddam United Kingdom? I thought it was a province of Wales, or something. I knew I didn't know the guy, but who can keep track? I opened it, and it was from the Irish Republican Pranksters."

"Oh, no."

"The hereditary enemies of my clan. Next thing I know we're all covered with this green stuff, I don't wanna know where it came from, but I know what it smelled like. And that was the end of that party. Just as well. I had to mail half the guests home, anyway."

"I hate those jerks. On St. Patrick's day you don't dare sit down without looking for a green whoopee cushion."

"You think you got it bad? Every mick in King City comes gunning for me on the seventeenth of March, so they can tell their buddies how they put one over on the bleedin' Princess o' Wales. And it's only gonna get worse now."

"Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown."

"I'll crown 'em, all right. I know where Paddy Flynn lives, and I'm gonna get even if it harelips the Mayor and the whole damn city council."

I reflected that you'd have to go a long way to find somebody as colorful as the new Queen. Once again I wondered what I was doing out here. I looked behind me, saw the four-story stadium around the landing site just about to vanish over the horizon. When it was gone, it would be easy to get lost out here. Not that I was worried about that. The suit had about seventeen different kinds of alarms and locators, a compass, probably things I didn't even know about. No real need for girl-scout tricks like noting the position of your shadow.

But the sense of aloneness was a little oppressive.

And illusory. I spotted another hiking party of five on the crest of a low rise off to my left. A flash of light made me look up, and I saw one of the Grand Mal trains arcing overhead on one of the free-trajectory segments of its route. It was spinning end over end, a maneuver I remember vividly since I'd been in the front car, hanging from my straps and watching the surface sweep by every two seconds when a big glob of half-digested caramel corn and licorice splattered on the glass in front of me, having just missed my neck. At that moment I had been regretting everything I had eaten for the last six years, and wondering if I was going to be seeing a good portion of it soon, right there beside the tasty treats on the windshield. Keeping it down may be one of the most amazing things I ever did.

"You ever ride that damn thing?" Liz asked. "I try it out every couple years, when I'm feeling mean. I swear, first time I think my ass sucked six inches of foam rubber out of the seat cushion. After that, It's not so bad. About like a barbed-wire enema."

I didn't reply-I'm not sure how one could reply to statements like that-because as she spoke she had stopped and waited for me to catch up, and she was punching buttons on a small device on her left hand. I saw a pattern of lights flash, mostly red, then they turned green one by one. When the whole panel was green she opened a service hatch on the front of my suit and studied whatever she found in there. She poked buttons, then straightened and made a thumbs-up gesture at me. She hung the device from a strap around my neck and regarded me with her fists on her hips.

"So, you want to talk where nobody can listen in. Well, talk, baby."

"What's that thing?"

"De-bugger. By which, it buggers up all the signals your suit is sending out, but not enough so they'll send out a search party. The machines up in orbit and down underground are getting the signals that keep them happy, but it's not the real stuff; it's what I want them to hear. Can't just step out here and cut off your emergency freaks. That signal goes away, it's an emergency in itself. But nobody can hear us now, take my word for it."

"What if we have a real emergency?"

"I was about to say, don't crack open if you want to keep a step ahead of your pallbearers. What's on your mind?"

Once again I found it hard to get started. I knew once I got the first words out it would be easy enough, but I agonized over those first words more than any first-time novelist.

"This may take some time," I hedged.

"It's my day off. Come on, Hildy; I love you, but cut the cards."

So I started in on my third telling of my litany of woe. You get better at these things as you go along. This time didn't take as long as it had with either Callie or Fox. Liz walked along beside me, saying nothing, guiding me back to some trail she was following when I started to stray.

The thing was, I'd decided to tell it this time where it logically should have begun the other two times: with my suicide attempts. And it was a little easier to tell it to someone I didn't know well, but not much. I was thankful she remained silent through to the end. I don't think I could have tolerated any of her unlikely folk sayings at that point.

And she stayed quiet for several minutes after I'd finished. I didn't mind that, either. As before, I was experiencing a rare moment of peace for having unburdened myself.

Liz is not quite in the Italian class of gesturing, but she did like to move her hands around when she talked. This is frustrating in a p-suit. So many gestures and nervous mannerisms involve touching part of the head or body, which is impossible when suited up. She looked as if she'd like to be chewing on a knuckle, or rubbing her forehead. Finally she turned and squinted at me suspiciously.

"Why did you come to me?"

"I didn't expect you could solve my problem, if that's what you mean."

"You got that right. I like you well enough, Hildy, but frankly, I don't care if you kill yourself. You want to do it, do it. And I think I resent it that you tried to use me to get it done."

"I'm sorry about that, but I wasn't even aware that's what I was doing. I'm still not sure if I was."

"Yeah, all right, it's not important."

"What I heard," I said, trying to put this delicately, "if you want something that's, you know, not strictly legal, that Liz was the gal to see."

"You heard that, did you?" She shot me a look that showed some teeth, but would never pass for a smile. She looked very dangerous. She was dangerous. How easy it would be for her to arrange an accident out here, and how powerless I would be to stop her. But the look was only a flicker, and her usual, amiable expression replaced it. She shrugged. "You heard right. That's what I thought we were coming out here for, to do some business. But after what you just said, I wouldn't sell to you."

"The way I reasoned," I went on, wondering what it was she sold, "if you're used to doing illegal deals, things the CC couldn't hear about, you must have methods of disguising your activities."

"I see that now. Sure. This is one of them." She shook her head slowly, and walked in a short circle, thinking it over. "I tell you Hildy, I've seen a rodeo, a three-headed man, and a duck fart underwater, but this is the craziest thing I ever did see. This changes all the rules."

"How do you mean?"

"Lots of ways. I never heard of that memory-dump business. I'm gonna look it up when we get back. You say it's not a secret?"

"That's what the CC said, and a friend of mine has heard of it."

"Well, that's not the real important thing. It's lousy, but I don't know what I can do about it, and I don't think it really concerns me. I hope not, anyway. But what you said about the CC rescuing you when you tried to kill yourself in your own home.

"What it is, the main thing that me keeps walking around free is what we call, in the trade, the Fourth Amendment. That's the series of computer programs that-"

"I've heard the term."

"Right. Searches and seizures. An all-powerful, pervasive computer that, if we let him loose, would make Big Brother seem like my maiden aunt Vickie listening with a teacup against the bedroom door. Balance that with the fact that everybody has something to hide, something we'd rather nobody knew about, even if it's not illegal, that lovely little right of privacy. I think what's saved us is the people who make the laws have something to hide, just like the rest of us.

"So what we do, in the, uh, 'criminal underworld,' is sweep for extra ears and eyes in our own homes… and then do our business right there. We know the CC is listening and watching, but not the part that types out the warrants and knocks down the doors."

"And that works?"

"It has so far. It sounds incredible when you think about it, but I've been dodging in and out of trouble most of my life, using just that method… essentially taking the CC at his word, now that you mention it."

"It sounds risky."

"You'd think so. But in all my life, I never heard of an instance where the CC used any illegally-obtained evidence. And I'm not just talking about making arrests. I'm talking about in establishing probable cause and issuing warrants, which is the key to the whole search and seizure thing. The CC hears, in one of his incarnations, things that would be incriminating, or at least be enough for a judge to issue a warrant for a search or a bug. But he doesn't tell himself what he knows, if you get my meaning. He's compartmentalized. When I talk to him, he knows I'm doing things that are against the law, and I know he knows it. But that's the dealing-with-Liz part of his brain, which is forbidden to tell the John Law part of his brain what he knows."

We walked a little farther, both of us mulling this over. I could see that what I'd told her made her very uneasy. I'd be nervous, too, in her place. I'd never broken any laws more serious than a misdemeanor; it's too easy to get caught, and there's nothing illegal I've ever particularly wanted to do. Hell, there's not that much that really is illegal in Luna. The things that used to give law enforcement ninety percent of their work-drugs, prostitution, and gambling, and the organizations that provided these things to a naughty populace-are all inalienable human rights in Luna. Violence short of death was just a violation, subject to a fine.

Most of the things that were still worth a heavy-duty law were so disgusting I didn't even want to think about them. Once more I wondered just what it was the Queen of England was involved in that made her the gal to see.

The biggest crime problem in Luna was theft of one sort or another. Until the CC is unleashed, we'll probably always have theft. Other than that, we're a pretty law-abiding society, which we achieved by trimming the laws back to a bare minimum.

Liz spoke again, echoing my thoughts.

"Crime just ain't a big problem, you know that," she said. "Otherwise, the citizenry in their great wisdom would clamor for the sort of electronic cage I've always feared we'd get sooner or later. All it would take would be to re-write a few programs, and we'd see the biggest round-up since John Wayne took the herd to Abilene. It's all just waiting to happen, you know. In about a millisecond the CC could start singing like a canary to the cops, and about three seconds later the warrants could be printed up." She laughed. "One problem, there's probably not enough cops to arrest everybody, much less jails to put them in. Every crime since the Invasion could be solved just like that. It boggles the mind just to think about it."

"I don't think that's going to happen," I said.

"No, thinking it over, what the CC's doing to you is really for your own good, even if it turns my stomach. I mean, suicide's a civil right, isn't it? What business does that fucker have saving your life?"

"Actually, I hate to admit it, but I'm glad he did."

"Well, I would be too, you know, but it's the principle of the thing. Listen, you know I'm going to spread this around, huh? I mean, tell all my friends? I won't use your name."

"Sure. I knew you would."

"Maybe we should take extra precautions. Right offhand, I can't think what they'd be, but I got a few friends who'll want to brainstorm on this one. You know what the scary thing is, I guess. He's overridden a basic program. If he can do one, he could do another."

"Catching you and curing you of your criminal tendencies might be seen as… well, for your own good."

"Exactly, that's exactly where that kind of bullshit thinking leads. You give 'em an inch, and they take a parsec."

We were back within sight of the visitors' gallery again. Liz stopped, began drawing aimless patterns in the dust with the tip of her boot. I figured she had something else she wanted to say, and knew she'd get to it soon. I looked up, and saw another roller coaster train arc overhead. She looked up at me.

"So… the reason you wanted to know how to get around the CC, I don't think you mentioned it, and that was…"

"Not so I could kill myself."

"I had to ask."

"I can't give you a concrete reason. I haven't done much… well, I don't feel like I've done enough to…"

"Take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them?"

"Like that. I've been sort of sleepwalking since this happened. And I feel like I ought to be doing something."

"Talking it over is doing something. Maybe all you can do except… you know, cheer up. Easy to say."

"Yes. How do you fight a recurrent suicidal urge? I haven't been able to tell where it comes from. I don't feel that depressed. But sometimes I just want to… hit something."

"Like me."

"Sorry."

"You paid for it. Man, Hildy, I can't think of a thing I would have done other than what you've told me. I just can't."

"Well, I feel like I ought to be doing something. Then there's the other part of it. The… violation. I wanted to find out if it's possible to get away from the CC's eyes and ears. Because… I don't want him watching if I, you know, do it again, damn it, I don't want him watching at all, I want him out of my body, and out of my mind, and out of my goddam life, because I don't like being one of his laboratory animals!"

She put her hand on my shoulder and I realized I'd been shouting. That made me mad, it shouldn't have, I know, because it was only a gesture of friendship and concern, but the last thing somebody crippled wants is your pity-and maybe not even your sympathy-he just wants to be normal again, just like everybody else. Every gesture of caring becomes a slap in the face, a reminder that you are not well. So damn your sympathy, damn your caring, how dare you stand over me, perfect and healthy, and offer your help and your secret condescension.

Yeah, right, Hildy, so if you're so independent how come you keep spilling your guts to strangers passing on the street? I barely knew Liz. I knew it was wrong, but I still had to bite my tongue to keep from telling her to keep her stinking hands off me, something I'd come close to half a dozen times with Fox. One day soon I'd go ahead and say it, lash out at him, and he'd probably be gone. I'd be alone again.

"You have to tell me how this all came out," Liz said. It relaxed me. She could have offered to help, and we'd have both known it was false. A simple curiosity about how the story came out was acceptable to me. She looked at the walls of the visitors' center. "I guess it's about time to piss on the fire and call in the dogs." She reached for the radio de-bugger.

"I have one more question."

"Shoot."

"Don't answer if you don't want to. But what do you do that's illegal?"

"Are you a cop?"

"What? No."

"I know that. I had you checked out, you don't work the police beat, you aren't friends with any cops."

"I know a couple of them fairly well."

"But you don't hang with them. Anyway, if you were a cop and you said you weren't, your testimony is inadmissible, and I got your denial on tape. Don't look so surprised; I gotta protect myself."

"Maybe I shouldn't have asked."

"I'm not angry." She sighed, and kicked at a beer can. "I don't guess many criminals think of themselves as criminals. I mean, they don't wake up and say 'Looks like a good day to break some laws.' I know what I do is illegal, but with me it's a matter of principle. What we desperados call the Second Amendment."

"Sorry, I'm not up on the U.S. Constitution. Which one is that?"

"Firearms." I tried to keep my face neutral. In truth, I'd feared something a lot worse than that.

"You're a gunrunner."

"I happen to believe it's a basic human right to be armed. The Lunar government disagrees strongly. That's why I thought you wanted to talk to me, to buy a gun. I brought you out here because I've got several of them buried in various places within a few kilometers."

"You'd have sold me one? Just handed it over?"

"Well, I might have told you where to dig."

"But how can you bury them? There's satellites watching you all the time when you're out here."

"I think I'll keep a few trade secrets, if you don't mind."

"Oh, sure, I was just-"

"That's all right, you're a reporter, you can't help being a nosy bitch."

She started again to take the electronic device from around my neck. I put my hand on it. I hadn't planned to do that.

"How much? I want to keep it."

She narrowed her eyes at me.

"You gonna walk out into the bush, invisible, and off yourself?"

"Hell, Liz, I don't know. I'm not planning to. I just like the idea that I can use it to be really alone if I want to. I like the thought of being able to vanish."

"It's not quite that simple… but I guess it's better than nothing."

She named a price, I called her a stinking thief and named a lower one. She named another. I'd have paid the first price, but I knew she was a haggler, from a long line of people who knew how to drive a hard bargain. We agreed soon, and she gave me an elaborate set of instructions on how to launder the payment so what transactions existed in the CC would be perfectly legal.

By then I was more than ready to go inside, as I'd been trying my best to practice the fourth method of liquid waste management, and was doing the Gotta-Do-It Samba.