Steel Beach

CHAPTER TEN

None of us were aware of the disaster at the time.

We drank a toast in champagne, a tradition among these engineering people. Within ten minutes Fox and I were back in the trailer and heading for an air lock. He said the fastest way back to King City was on the surface, and that was fine with me. I didn't enjoy driving through the system of tunnels that honeycombed the rock around a disneyland.

We had no sooner emerged into the sunlight than the trailer was taken over by the autopilot, which informed us that we would have to enter a holding pattern or land, since all traffic was being cleared for emergency vehicles. A few of these streaked silently past us, blue lights flashing.

Neither of us could remember an emergency of this apparent size on the surface. There were occasional pressure losses in the warrens, of course. No system is perfect. But loss of life in these accidents was rare. So we turned on the radio, and what we heard sent me searching through Fox's belongings in the back of the trailer until I came up with a newspad. It was the Straight Shit, and in other circumstances I would have teased him unmercifully about that. But the story that came over the pad was the type that made any snide remarks die in one's throat.

There had been a major blowout at a surface resort called Nirvana. First reports indicated some loss of life, and live pictures from security cameras-all that was available for the first ten minutes we watched-showed bodies lying motionless by a large swimming pool. The pool was bubbling violently. At first we thought it was a big jacuzzi, then we realized with a shock that the water was boiling. Which meant there was no air in there, and those people were certainly dead. Their postures were odd, too. They all seemed to be holding on to something, such as a table leg or a heavy concrete planter with a palm tree.

A story like that evolves in its own fractured way. First reports are always sketchy, and usually wrong. We heard estimates of twenty dead, then fifty, then, spoken in awe, two hundred. Then those reports were denied, but I had counted thirty corpses myself. It was maddening. We're spoiled by instant coverage, we expect news stories to be cogent, prompt, and nicely framed by steady cameras. These cameras were steady, all right. They were immobile, and after a few minutes your mind screamed for them to pan, just a little bit, so you could see what was just out of sight. But that didn't happen until about ten minutes after we landed, ten minutes that seemed like an hour.

At first I think it affected me more than Fox. He was shocked and horrified, naturally, and so was I, on one level. The other level, the newshound, was seething with impatience, querying the autopilot three times a minute when we could get up and out of there so I could go cover the story. It's not pretty, I know, but any reporter will understand the impulse. You want to move. You tuck the horror of the images away in some part of your mind where police and coroners put ugly things, and your pulse pounds with impatience to get the next detail, and the next, and the next. To be stuck on the ground fifteen klicks away was torture of the worst kind.

Then a fact was mentioned that made it all too real for Fox. I didn't catch its importance. I just looked over at him and saw his face had gone white and his hands were trembling.

"What's the matter?" I said.

"The time," he whispered. "They just mentioned the time of the blowout."

I listened, and the announcer said it again.

"Was that…?"

"Yes. It was within a second of the blast."

I was still so preoccupied with wanting to get to Nirvana that it was a full minute before I realized what I should be doing. Then I turned on Fox's phone and called the Nipple, using my second-highest urgency code to guarantee quick access to Walter. The top code, he had told me, was reserved for filing on the end of the universe, or an exclusive interview with Elvis.

"Walter, I've got footage of the cause of the blowout," I said, when his ugly face appeared on the screen.

"The cause? You were there? I thought everybody-"

"No, I wasn't there. I was in Kansas. I have reason to believe the disaster was set off by a nuclear explosion I was watching in Kansas."

"It sounds unlikely. Are you sure-"

"Walter, it has to be, or else it's the biggest coincidence since that straight flush I beat your full house with."

"That was no coincidence."

"Damn right it wasn't, and someday I'll tell you how I did it. Meantime, you've wasted twenty seconds of valuable newstime. Run it with a disclaimer if you want to, you know, 'Could this have been the cause of the tragedy in Nirvana?' "

"Give it to me."

I fumbled around on the dash, and swore under my breath. "Where's the neurofeed on this damn thing?" I asked Fox. He was looking at me strangely, but he pulled a wire from a recessed compartment. I fumbled it into my occipital socket, and said the magic words that caused the crystalline memory to recycle and spew forth the last six hours of holocam recordings in five seconds.

"Where the hell are you, anyway?" Walter was saying. "I've had a call out for you for twenty minutes."

I told him, and he said he'd get on it. Thirty seconds later the autopilot was cleared into the traffic pattern. The press has some clout in situations like this, but I hadn't been able to apply it from my beached position. We rose into the sky… and turned the wrong way.

"What the hell are you doing?" I asked Fox, incredulously.

"Going back to King City," he said, quietly. "I have no desire to witness any of what we've seen first-hand. And I especially don't want to witness you covering it."

I was about to blast him out of his seat, but I took another look, and he looked dangerous. I had the feeling that one more word from me would unleash something I didn't want to hear, and maybe even more than that. So I swallowed it, mentally calculating how long it would take me to get back to Nirvana from the nearest King City air lock.

With a great effort I pulled myself out of reportorial mode and tried to act like a human being. Surely I could do it for a few minutes, I thought.

"You can't be thinking you had anything to do with this," I said. He kept his eyes forward, as if he really had to see where the trailer was going.

"You told me yourself-"

"Look, Hildy. I didn't set the charge, I didn't do the calculations. But some of my friends did. And it's going to reflect on all of us. Right now I have to get onto the phone, we're going to have to try and find out what went wrong. And I do feel responsible, so don't try to argue me out of it, because I know it isn't logical. I just wish you wouldn't talk to me right now."

I didn't. A few minutes later he smashed his fist into the dashboard and said, "I keep remembering us standing around watching. Cheering. I can still taste the champagne."

I got out at the airlock, flagged a taxi, and told it to take me to Nirvana.

Most disasters look eminently preventable in hindsight. If only the warnings had been heeded, if only this safety measure had been implemented, if only somebody had thought of this possibility, if only, if only. I exempt the so-called acts of God, which used to include things like earthquakes, hurricanes, and meteor strikes. But hurricanes are infrequent on Luna. Moon quakes are almost as rare, and selenography is exact enough to predict them with a high degree of accuracy. Meteors come on very fast and very hard, but their numbers are small and their average size is tiny, and all vulnerable structures are ringed with radars powerful enough to detect any dangerous ones and lasers big enough to vaporize them. The last blowout of any consequence had happened almost sixty years before the Kansas Collapse. Lunarians had grown confident of their safety measures. We had grown complacent enough to overcome our innate suspicion of vacuum and the surface, some of us, to the point where the rich now frolicked and tanned in the sunlight beneath domes designed to give the impression they weren't even there. If someone had built a place like Nirvana a hundred years ago there would have been few takers. Back then the rich peopled only the lowest, most secure levels and the poor took their chances with only eight or nine pressure doors between them and the Breathsucker.

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 deity-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 lace 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.

I met several people I knew, was introduced to dozens whose names I promptly forgot. Among my new friends were the Shaka of the Zulu Nation, the Emperor of Japan, the Maharajah of Gujarat, and the Tsarina of All the Russias, or at least people in silly costumes who styled themselves that way. Also countless Counts, Caliphs, Archdukes, Satraps, Sheiks and Nabobs. Who was I to dispute their titles? There had been a vogue in such genealogy about the time Callie had grudgingly expelled my ungrateful squalling form into a less-than overwhelmed world; Callie had even told me she thought she might be related to Mussolini, on her mother's side. Did that make me the heir-apparent of Il Duce? It wasn't a burning question to me. I overheard intense debates about the rules of primogeniture-even Salic Law, of all things-in an age of sex changing. Someone-I think it was the Duke of York-gave me a lecture about it shortly before the ceremony, explaining why Liz was inheritor to the throne, even though she had a younger brother.

After escaping from that with most of my wits intact, I found myself out on the balcony, nursing a strawberry Margarita. Howard's had a view, but it was of the cargo side of the spaceport. I looked out over the beached-whale hulks of bulk carriers expelling their interplanetary burdens into waiting underground tanks. I was almost alone, which puzzled me for a moment, until I remembered a story I'd seen about how many people had suddenly lost their taste for surface views in the wake of the Kansas Collapse. I drained my drink, reached out and tapped the invisible curved canopy that held vacuum at bay, and shrugged. Somehow I didn't think I'd die in a blowout. I had worse things to fear.

Somebody held out another pink drink with salt on the rum. I took it and looked over and up-and up and up-into the smiling face of Brenda, girl reporter and apprentice giraffe. I toasted her.

"Didn't expect to see you here," I said.

"I got acquainted with the Princess after your… accident."

"That was no accident."

She prattled on about what a nice party it was. I didn't disillusion her. Wait till she'd attended a few thousand more just like it, then she'd see.

I'd been curious what Brenda's reaction would be to my new sex. To my chagrin, she was delighted. I got the skinney from a homo-oriented friend at the fashion desk: Brenda was young enough to still be exploring her own sexuality, discovering her preferences. She'd already been pretty sure she leaned toward females as lovers, at least when she was a woman. Discovering her preferences as a male would have to wait for her first Change. After all, until quite recently she'd been effectively neuter. The only problem she'd had in her crush on me was that she wasn't much attracted to males. She had thought it would remain platonic until I thoughtfully made everything perfect by showing up at work as my gorgeous new self.

I really, really didn't have the heart to tell her about my preferences.

And I did owe her. She had been covering for me, putting my by-line on the Invasion Bicentennial stories she was writing, the stories I simply could no longer bring myself to work on. Oh, I was helping, answering her questions, going over her drafts, punching up the prose, showing her how to leave just enough excess baggage in the stories so Walter would have something to cut out and shout at her about and thus remain a happy man. I think Walter was beginning to suspect what was going on, but he hadn't said anything yet because expecting me to cover the Collapse and get in our weekly feature was unfair, and he knew it. The thing he should have foreseen before he ever came up with his cockamamie Invasion series was that there would always be a story like the Collapse happening, and as a good editor he had to assign his best people to it, which included me. Oh, yeah, if you wanted somebody to intrude on grief and ogle bodies puffed up like pink and brown popcorn, Hildy was your girl.

"Tell me, sweetheart, how did you feel when you saw the man cut your daddy's head off?"

"What?" Brenda was looking at me strangely.

"It's the essential disaster/atrocity question," I said. "They don't tell you that in Journalism 101, but all the questions we ask, no matter how delicately phrased, boil down to that. The idea is to get the first appearance of the tear, the ineffable moment when the face twists up. That's gold, honey. You'd better learn how to mine it."

"I don't think that's true."

"Then you'll never be a great reporter. Maybe you should try social work."

I saw that I had hurt her, and it made me angry, both at her and at myself. She had to understand these things, dammit. But who appointed you, Hildy? She'll find out soon enough, as soon as Walter takes her off these damn comparative anthropology stories that our readers don't even want to see and lets her get out where she can grub in the dirt like the rest of us.

I realized I'd drunk a little more than I had intended. I dumped the rest of my drink in a thirsty-looking potted plant, snagged a coke from a passing tray, and performed a little ritual I'd come to detest but was powerless to stop. It consisted of a series of questions, like this: Do you feel the urge to hurl yourself off this balcony, assuming you could drill a hole through that ultralexan barrier? No. Great, but do you want to throw a rope over that beam and haul yourself up into the rafters? Not today, thank you. And so on.

I was about to say something nice and neutral and soothing, suitable for the reassurance of idealistic cub reporters, when the Jamaican steel band which had been reprising every patriotic British song since the Spanish Armada suddenly struck up God Save The Queen, and somebody asked everyone to haul their drunken asses down to the main ballroom, where the coronation was about to commence. Not in those words, of course.

There was another band in the ballroom, playing some horrible modern version of Rule Britannia. This was the public portion of the show, and I guess Liz thought it ought to make some attempt to appeal to the tastes of the day. I thought the music was dreadful, but Brenda was snapping her fingers, so I suppose it was at least current.

A few specialty channels and some of the 'pads had sent reporters, but the crowd in the ballroom was essentially the same folks I'd been avoiding up in the Suites one and two, only they weren't holding drinks. A lot of them looked as if they wished the show would hurry up, so they could hold drinks again, for a short time, at least.

One touch Liz hadn't expected was the decorations. From the whispers I overheard, she'd only booked the hall for one hour. When the coronation was over a wedding party was scheduled to hold a reception there, so the walls were draped in white bunting and repulsive little cherubs, and there was a big sign hung on the wall that said Mazel Tov! Liz looked a little non-plussed. She glanced around with that baffled expression one sometimes gets after wandering into a strange place. Could there have been a mistake?

But the coronation itself went off without a hitch. She was proclaimed "Elizabeth III, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland and of her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Empress of India, Head of the Commonwealth and Defender of the Faith."

Sure, it was easy to snicker, and I did, but to myself. I could see that Liz took it seriously, almost in spite of herself. No matter how spurious the claims of some of these other clowns might have been to ancient titles, Liz's was spotless and unquestioned. The actual Prince of Wales had been living and working on Luna at the time of the Invasion, and she was descended from him.

The original Crown Jewels had naturally not accompanied the King in Exile to Luna; they were buried with the rest of London-of England, of Europe, of the whole surface of Planet Earth. Liz had the use of a very nice crown, orb, and sceptre. Hovering in the background as these items were produced was a man from Tiffany's. Not the one in the Platz, but the discount outlet down on Leystrasse, where even as the tiara was lowered onto Liz's head a sign was going up announcing "By Appointment to Her Majesty, The Queen." The jewels were hired, and would soon reside in a window advertising the usual E-Z Credit Terms.

A procession was traditional after a coronation back when the Empire had any real meaning-and even after it had become just a tourist attraction. But processions can be difficult to organize in the warrens of Luna, where the cities are usually broken up into pressure-defensible malls and arcades connected by tube trains. So after the ceremony we all straggled into a succession of subway cars and zipped across town to Liz's neighborhood, many of us growing steadily more sober and unsure why we'd come in the first place.

But all was well. The real party began when we arrived at the post-coronation reception, held in the Masonic Lodge Hall half-way between Liz's apartment and the studio where she worked. In addition to its many other virtues the lodge didn't cost her anything, which meant she could spend what royal budget she had left entirely on food, booze, and entertainment.

This bash was informal and relaxed, the only kind I enjoy. The band was good, playing a preponderance of things from Liz's teenage years, which put them mid-way between my era and Brenda's. It was stuff I could dance to. So I stumbled out into the public corridor in my two-tone Oxford lace-ups-and a clunkier shoe has never been invented-found a mail box and called my valet. I told it to pack up the drop-dead shiny black sheath dress slit from the ankles to you-should-only-blush and 'tube it over to me. I went into the public comfort station and changed my hair color to platinum and put a long wave in it, and when I came out, three minutes later, the package was waiting for me. I stripped out of the Halloween costume and stuffed it into the return capsule, cajoled my abundance into the outfit's parsimonious interior. Just getting into that thing was almost enough to give you an orgasm. I left my feet bare. And to hell with Kate Hepburn; Veronica Lake was on the prowl.

I danced almost non-stop for two hours. I had one dance with Liz, but she was naturally much in demand. I danced with Brenda, who was a very good if visually unlikely terpsichorean. Mostly I danced with a succession of men, and I turned down a dozen interesting offers. I'd selected my eventual target, but I was in no hurry unless he suddenly decided to leave.

He didn't. When I was ready I cut him out of the herd. I put a few moves on him, mostly in the form of dance steps whose meaning couldn't have been missed by a eunuch. He wanted to join the rather sparsely-attended orgy going on in one corner of the ballroom, but I dragged him off to what the Masons called, too coyly in my opinion, snuggle rooms. We spent a very enjoyable hour in one of them. He liked to be spanked, and bitten. It's not my thing, but I can accommodate most consenting adults as long as my needs are attended to as well. He did a very good job of that. His name was Larry, and he claimed to be the Duke of Bosnia-Herzegovina, but that might have been just to get into my pants. The couple of times I drew blood he asked me to do it again, so I did, but eventually lost my… well, my taste for that sort of thing. We exchanged phone codes and said we'd look each other up, but I didn't intend to. He was nice to look at but I felt I'd chewed off about as much as I wanted.

I staggered back into the ballroom drenched in sweat. It had been very intense there for a while. I headed for the bar, dodging dancers. The faint-hearted had left, leaving about half the original attendees, but those looked ready to party till Monday morning. I eased my pinkened, pleasantly sore cheeks onto a padded barstool next to the Queen of England, the Empress of India, and the Defender of the Faith, and Liz slowly turned her head toward me. I now knew where her impressive ears came from. There were posters of past monarchs taped to the walls here, and she was the spitting image of Charles III.

"Innkeeper," she shouted, above the music. "Bring me salt. Bring me tequila. Bring me the nectar of the lime, your plumpest strawberries, your coldest ice, your finest crystal. My friend needs a drink, and I intend to build it for her."

"Ain't got no strawberries," the bartender said.

"Then go out and kill some!"

"It's all right, Your Majesty," I said. "Lime will be fine."

She grinned foolishly at me. "I purely do like the sound of that. 'Your Majesty.' Is that awful?"

"You're entitled, as they say. But don't expect me to make a habit of it." She draped an arm over my shoulder and exhaled ethanol.

"How are you, Hildy? Having a good time? Getting laid?"

"Just did, thank you."

"Don't thank me. And you look it, honey, if I may say so."

"Didn't have time to freshen up yet."

"You don't need to. Who did the work?"

I showed her the monogram on the nail of my pinkie. She squinted at it, and seemed to lose interest, which might have meant that Bobbie's fears of falling out of fashion were well-grounded-Liz would be up on these things-or only that her attention span was not what it might be.

"What was I gonna say? Oh, yeah. Can I do anything for you, Hildy? There's a tradition among my people… well, maybe it's not an English tradition, but it's somebody's damn tradition, what you gotta do is, anybody asks you for a favor on your coronation day, you gotta grant it."

"I think that's a Mafia tradition."

"Is it? Well, it's your people, then. So just ask. Only be real, okay? I mean, if it's gonna cost a lot of money, forget it. I'm gonna be payin' for this fucking shivaree for the next ten fucking years. But that's okay. It's only money, right? And what a party. Am I right?

"As a matter of fact, there is something you could do for me."

I was about to tell her, but the bartender delivered a Margarita in its component parts, and Liz could only think about one thing at a time. She spilled a lot of salt on the bar, spread it out, moistened the rim of a wide glass, and did things necessary to produce a too-strong concoction with that total concentration of the veteran drunk. She did it competently, and I sipped at the drink I hadn't really wanted.

"So. Name it, kiddo, and it's yours. Within reason."

"If you… let's say… if you wanted to have a conversation with somebody, and you wanted to be sure no one would overhear it… what would you do? How would you go about it?"

She frowned and her brow furrowed. She appeared to be thinking heavily, and her hand toyed with the layer of salt in front of her.

"Now that's a good one. That's a real good one. I'm not sure if anyone's ever asked me that before." She looked slowly down at the salt, where her finger had traced out CC??. I looked up at her, and nodded.

"You know what bugs are like these days. I'm not sure if there's any place that can't be bugged. But I'll tell you what. I know some techs back at the studio, they're real clever about these things. I could ask them and get back to you." Her hand had wiped out the original message and written p-suit. I nodded again, and saw that while she was without a doubt very, very drunk, she knew how to handle herself. There was a glint of speculation in those eyes I wasn't sure I liked. I wondered what I might be getting myself into.

We talked a while longer, and she wrote out a time and a destination in the salt crystals. Then someone else sat next to her and started fondling her breasts and she was showing a definite interest, so I got up and returned to the dance floor.

I danced almost an hour longer, but my heart wasn't really in it. A guy made a play for me, and he was pretty, and persuasive, and a very good, raunchy dancer, but in the end I felt he just didn't try hard enough. When I'm not the aggressor I can choose to take a lot of persuading. In the end I gave him my phone code and said call me in a week and we'd see, and got the impression he probably wouldn't.

I showered and bought a paper chemise in the locker room, staggered to the tube terminal, and got aboard. I fell asleep on the way home, and the train had to wake me up.