Steel Beach

CHAPTER FIVE

"If you're going to build a barn for brontosaurs," I told Brenda, "You'd better make the ceiling at least twenty meters high."

"And why is that, Mr. Bones?"

Where she'd learned about minstrel shows I had no idea, but she'd been using the term for a while now, whenever I got into lecture mode-which, considering the state of her ignorance, was most of the time. I wasn't going to let it annoy me.

She was looking up at the ceiling, which was twenty-five meters above us. Myself, I wasn't looking up all that much lately. For several days I'd had a persistent and painful stabbing pain in my neck whenever I turned my head in a certain position. I kept meaning to visit the medico and get it fixed, but it would spontaneously remit for a few hours and I'd forget to make an appointment. Then it would creep up and stab me when I least expected it.

"Brontosaurs are not real bright. When they get alarmed they raise their heads and rear up on their hind legs to take a look around. If the ceiling is too low they smash their teeny heads against it and stun themselves."

"You've spent time around dinosaurs?"

"I grew up on a dinosaur ranch." I took her elbow and steered her out of the way of a manure loader. We watched as it scooped up a pile of watermelon-sized pellets.

"What a stench."

I said nothing. The smell had both good and bad associations for me. It took me back to my childhood, where one of my jobs had been operating the manure loader.

Behind us, the massive doors to the swamp began rumbling open, letting in a blast of air even hotter and more humid than that inside the barn. In a moment a long neck poked inside the door, ending in an almost negligible, goofy-looking head. The neck kept coming in for a very long time before the massive body made its entrance. By then another head and neck had appeared.

"Let's get back here out of the way," I suggested to Brenda. "They won't step on you if they see you, but they tend to forget where you are not long after they look away from you."

"Where are they going?"

I pointed toward the open gate across from us. The sign on it said "Mating Pen Number One."

"Mating season's just about over. Wait till Callie gets them penned up, then we can take a look. It's pretty interesting."

One of the brontosaurs made a mournful honk and moved along a little faster. In one-sixth gee, even a thunder lizard could be sprightly. I doubt they set any speed records back on Old Earth. In fact, I wondered how they stood up at all, out of the water.

The reason for the burst of speed was soon apparent. Callie entered the barn, mounted on a tyrannosaur. The big predator responded instantly to every touch of the reins, hurrying to block an attempted retreat by the male, rearing up and baring its teeth when it looked as if the female might make a stand. The big herbivores waddled quickly into the mating pen. The doors closed automatically behind them.

The thing the ancient paleontologists had never got right about dinosaurs was their color. You'd think the examples of so many modern reptiles might have given them a hint. But if you look at old artists' conceptions of dinosaurs, the predominant colors were mud-brown and khaki-green. The real item was much different.

There are several strains of b-saur but the type Callie prefers are called Cal Tech Yellowbellies, after the lab that first produced them. In addition to the canary undersides, they range from that old reliable mud-brown on their backs to a dark green, emerald green, and kelly green on their sides and necks. They have streaks of iridescent violet trailing back from their eyes, and white patches under their throats.

Tyrannosaurs, of course, are predominately red. They have huge, dangling wattles under their necks, like iguanas, which can be puffed up to make an outrageous booming mating call. The wattles are usually deep blue, though purple and even black are not unknown.

You can't ride a t-saur like a horse; the back is too steep. There are different methods, but Callie preferred a sort of narrow platform she could either sit or stand on, depending on what she was doing. It strapped around the beast's shoulders. Considering the amount of lizard still rising above that point, she spent most of her time on her feet, barely able to peer over the head.

"It looks unstable," Brenda said. "What if she falls off?"

"You don't want to do that," I told her. "They're likely to snap at you if you come in view suddenly. But don't worry; this one is muzzled."

An assistant leaped up to join Callie in the saddle. He took the reins from her and she jumped to the ground. As the t-saur was being ridden out the barn door she glanced at us, did a double-take, and waved at me. I waved back, and she gestured for us to come over. Not waiting, she started toward the breeding pen.

I was about to join her when something poked through the metal railing behind us. Brenda jumped, then relaxed. It was a brontosaur pup looking for a treat. Looking into the dim pen behind us, I could see several dozen of the elephant-sized young ones, most of them snugged into the mud, a few others gathered around the feeding trough.

I turned out my pockets to show the brute I didn't have anything on me. I used to carry chunks of sugar-cane, which they love.

Brenda didn't have any pockets to turn out, for the simple reason that she wasn't wearing any pants. Her outfit for the day was knee-length soft leather boots, and a little black bolero top. This was intended to let me know that she had acquired something new: primary and secondary sexual characteristics. I was fairly sure she hoped I'd suggest we put them to use one of these days soon. I'd first caught on that she had a crush on me when she learned that Hildy Johnson was not my born name, but one I had selected myself after a famous fictional reporter from a play called The Front Page. Soon she was "Brenda Starr."

I must say she looked more reasonable now. Neuters had always made me nervous. She had not gone overboard with the breasts. The pubic hair was natural, not some of the wilder styles that come and go.

But I was in no mood to try it out. Let her find a child of her own age.

We joined Callie at the breeding pen, climbed up to the top of the ten-meter gate and stood with her, looking over the top rail at the nervously milling behemoths.

"Brenda," I said, "I'd like you to meet Calamari Cabrini. She owns this place. Callie, meet Brenda, my… uh, assistant."

The women reached across me to shake hands, Brenda almost losing her balance on the slippery steel bars. All three of us were dripping wet. Not only was it hot and humid in the barn, but ceiling sprinklers drenched the place every ten minutes because it was good for the skins of the livestock. Callie was the only one who looked comfortable, because she wore no clothes. I should have remembered and worn less myself; even Brenda was doing better than me.

Nudity was not a sometime thing for Callie. I'd known her all my life, and in that time had never seen her wear so much as a pinky ring. There was no big philosophy behind her life-long naturism. Callie went bare simply because she liked it, and hated picking out clothes in the morning.

She was looking good, I thought, considering that, except for Walter, she took less notice of her body's needs than anyone I knew. She never did any preventive maintenance, never altered anything about her appearance. When something broke down she had it fixed or replaced. Her medico bills were probably among the smallest in Luna. She swore she had once used a heart for one hundred and twenty years.

"When it finally gave out," she had told me, "the medico said the valves could have come out of a forty-year-old."

If you met her on the street, you would know immediately that she was Earth-born. During her childhood, humans had been separable into many "races," based on skin color, facial features, and type of hair. Post-Invasion eugenics had largely succeeded in blending these so that racial types were now very rare. Callie had been one of the white, or Caucasian race, which dominated much of human history since the days of colonization and industrialization. Caucasian was a pretty slippery term. Callie's imperious nose would have looked right at home on an old Roman coin. One of Herr Hitler's "Aryans" would have sneered at her. The important racial concept then was "white," which meant not-black, not-brown.

Which was a laugh, because Callie's skin was burned a deep, reddish-brown from head to toe, and looked as leathery as some of her reptiles. It was startling to touch it and find it actually quite soft and supple.

She was tall-not like Brenda, but certainly tall for her age-and willowy, with an unkept mane of black hair streaked with white. Her most startling feature was her pale blue eyes, a gift from her Nordic father.

She released Brenda's hand and gave me a playful shove.

"Mario, you never come see me anymore," she chided.

"The name is Hildy now," I said. "It has been for thirty years."

"You prove my point. I guess that means you're still working for that bird-cage liner."

I shrugged, and noticed Brenda's uncomprehending expression.

"Newspads used to be printed out on paper, then they'd sell the paper," I explained. "When people were through reading it, they'd use it on the bottoms of their birdcages. Callie never abandons a clich, no matter how dated."

"And why should I? The clich business has suffered a radical decline since the Invasion. What we need are new and better clichs, but nobody seems to be writing them. Present company excepted, of course."

"From Callie, that's almost a compliment," I told Brenda. "And nobody would line a birdcage with the Nipple, Callie. The stories would put the birds right off their food."

She considered it. "I don't think so, Mario. If we had electronic birds, your newspad would be the perfect liner.

"Could be. I do find it useful for wrapping my electronic fish."

Most of this had gone right over Brenda's head, of course. But she had never been one to let a little ignorance bother her.

"To catch the shit?" she said.

We both looked at her.

"At the bottom of the birdcage," she explained.

"I think I like her," Callie said.

"Of course you do. She's an empty vessel, waiting to be filled with your tall tales of the old days."

"That's one reason. You've been using her as your own personal birdcage liner. She needs my help."

"She doesn't seem to mind."

"But I do," Brenda said, unexpectedly. Callie and I looked at her again.

"I know I don't know much about ancient history." She saw Callie's expression, and squirmed. "Sorry. But how much do you expect me to know about things that happened hundreds of years ago? Or care?"

"It's okay," Callie said. "I may not have used the word 'ancient'-I still think of the Roman Empire when that word comes up-but I can see it must seem ancient to you. I said the same thing to my parents when they talked about things that happened before I was born. The difference is, when I was young the old eventually had the good manners to die. A new generation took over. Your generation faces a different situation. Hildy seems very old to you, but I'm more than twice his age, and I don't have any plans to die. Maybe that's not fair to your generation, but it's a fact."

"The gospel according to Calamari," I said.

"Shut up, Mario. Brenda, it's never going to be your world. Your generation will never take over from us. It's not my world anymore, either, because of you. All of us, from both generational extremes, have to run this world together, which means we have to make the effort to understand each other's viewpoints. It's hard for me, and I know it must be hard for you. It's as if I had to live with my great-great-great-great-grandparents, who grew up during the industrial revolution and were ruled by kings. We'd barely even have a language in common."

"That's okay with me," Brenda said. "I do make the effort. Why doesn't he?"

"Don't worry about him. He's always been like that."

"Sometimes he makes me so mad."

"It's just his way."

"Yoo-hoo, ladies. I'm here."

"Shut up, Mario. I can read him like a book, and I can tell he likes you. It's just that, the more he likes you, the worse he tends to treat you. It's his way of distancing himself from affection, which he's not sure he's able to return."

I could see the wheels turning in Brenda's head and, since she was not stupid, just ignorant, she eventually followed that statement out to its logical-if you believed the premise in the first place-conclusion, which was that I must love her madly, because I treated her very badly. I looked ostentatiously around at the walls of the barn.

"It must be hanging in your office," I said.

"What's that?"

"Your degree in psychology. I didn't even know you went back to school."

"I've been in school every day of my life, jerk. And I sure wouldn't need a degree to see through you. I spent thirty years learning how to do that." There was more, something about how just because I was a hundred years old now, I shouldn't think I'd changed so much. But it was all in Italian, so I only got the gist.

Callie gets a modest yearly stipend from the Antiquities Preservation Board for staying fluent in Italian-something she would have done anyway, since it was her native language and she had firm ideas about the extinction of human knowledge. She had tried to teach it to me but I had no aptitude beyond a few kitchen words. And what was the point? The Central Computer stored hundreds of languages no one spoke anymore, from Cheyenne to Tasmanian, including all the languages that had suffered a drastic drop in popularity because they never got established on Luna before the Invasion. I spoke English and German, like most everybody else, with a little Japanese thrown in. There were sizable groups of Chinese speakers, and Swahili, and Russian. Other than that, languages were preserved by study groups of a few hundred fanatics like Callie.

I doubt Brenda even knew there was an Italian language, so she listened to Callie's tirade with a certain wariness. Ah, yes, Italian is a fine language for tirades.

"I guess you've known each other a long time," Brenda said to me.

"We go way back."

She nodded, unhappy about something. Callie shouted, and I turned to see her jump down into the breeding pen and stride toward the crew of helpers, who were chivying the two brutes into final mating position.

"Not yet, you idiots," she shouted. "Give them time." She reached the group of people and started handing out orders right and left. Callie had never been able to find good help. I had been part of that help for a great many years, so I know what I'm talking about. It took me a long time to realize that no one would ever be good enough for her; she was one of those people who never believed anyone could do a job as well as she could do it herself. The maddening thing was, she was usually right.

"Back off, they're not ready yet. Don't rush them. They'll know when it's time. Our job is to facilitate, not initiate."If I have any skills as a lover," I told Brenda, "it's because of that."

"Because of her?"

"'Give them time. We're not on a schedule here. Show a little finesse.' I heard that so many times I guess I took it to heart."

And it did take me back, watching Callie working the stock again. Of the major brontosaur ranchers in Luna, she was the only one who didn't use artificial insemination at breeding time. "If you think helping a pair copulate is tough," she always said, "try getting a semen sample from a brontosaur bull."

And there was a rough sort of poetry about dinosaur mating, particularly brontosaurs.

Tyrannosaurs went about it as you might expect, full of sound and fury. Two bulls would butt heads over a prospective mate until one staggered away like a dusted-up nerg addict to nurse an epic headache. I don't suppose the victor fared a lot better except for the chance to grapple the tiny claw of his lady fair.

Brontosaurs were more dainty. The male would spend three or four days doing his dance, when he remembered to. These creatures had short attention spans, even when in heat. He would rear up on his hind legs and do a comical samba around and around the female. She typically showed minimal interest for the first two days. Then the seduction moved to the love-bite stage, with the male nipping her around the base of the tail while she placidly chewed her cud. When she finally began rearing up with him, it was time to bring them into the mating pen to pitch some serious woo.

That was going on now. The two of them were facing each other on their hind legs, doing a little neck-weaving, a little foreleg pawing. It could still be another hour before they were ready, a condition signaled by the emergence of one of the bull's two hemi-penes.

Nobody ever told me why a reptile needs two penises. Come to think of it, I never asked. There are limits to curiosity.

"So how long were you involved with Callie?"

"What's that?" Brenda had drawn me out of my reverie, as she had a habit of doing.

"She said thirty years. That's a long time. You must have been real serious about her."

All right, so I'm dense. But I finally got it. I looked out at the primal scene: two Mesozoic monsters, here through the grace of modern genetic science, and a thin brown woman, likewise.

"She's not my lover. She's my mother. Why don't you go down there with her? She'll see you don't get hurt, and I'm sure she'll be happy to tell you more than you ever wanted to know about brontosaurs. I'm going to take a break."

I noticed as we climbed down the gate on opposite sides that Brenda looked happier than I'd seen her all day.

I assume the mating went off without any trouble. It usually does when Callie's in charge. I imagine the mating that produced me was equally well-planned and carried out. Sex was never a big deal to Callie. Having me was her nod in the direction of duty. But I have no siblings, despite powerful societal pressure toward large families at the time of my birth. Once was apparently enough.

Paradoxically, I know I didn't spend any time in a Petri dish, though it would have made the whole process much easier for her if she'd availed herself of any of the medical advances that could, today, make procreation, gestation, and parturition about as personally involving as a wrong number on the telephone. Callie had conceived me the old-fashioned way: a random spermatozoan hitting the jackpot at the right time of the month. She had carried me to full term, and had borne me in pain, just like God promised Eve. And she had hated every minute of it. How do I know that? She told me, and anyone else who would listen. She told me an average of three times a day throughout my childhood.

It wasn't so much the pain that had bothered her. For a woman who could shoulder a reproductive organ almost as big as she was and guide it into a cloaca of a filthiness that had to be seen to be disbelieved, while standing knee-deep in dinosaur droppings, Callie had an amazing streak of prissiness. She had hated the bloodiness of childbirth, the smells and sensations of it.

Callie's office was cool. That's what I'd had in mind when I went up there, simply to cool off. But it wasn't working. All that had happened was that the sweat on my body had turned clammy. I was breathing hard, and my hands weren't steady. I felt on the edge of an anxiety attack, and I didn't know why. On top of all that, my neck was hurting again.

And why hadn't I mentioned the purpose of our visit? I'd told myself it was because she was too busy, but there had been plenty of time while the three of us stood on the gate. Instead, I'd let her prattle on about the good old days. It would have been a perfect opportunity to brace her about taking the job as the Earth-born member of our little team of time-travelers. After holding forth about the generational gap she would have looked silly turning us down. And I knew Callie. She would love the job, would never admit loving it, and would only accept it if she could be tricked into making it look as if she had come up with the idea herself, as a favor to me and Brenda.

I got up and moved to the windows. That didn't help, so I walked to the opposite wall. No improvement. After I'd done that three or four times I realized I was pacing. I rubbed the back of my neck, drifted over to the windows again, and looked out and down.

Callie's office windows overlook the barn interior from just beneath the roof. There's a stairway leading to a verandah "outside"-actually, within the small disneyland that is her ranch. I was looking out over the breeding pens I had just left. Callie was there, pointing something out to Brenda, who stood beside her watching the spectacle of two mating brontosaurs. Standing just behind them was someone who looked familiar. I squinted, but it didn't help, so I grabbed the pair of binoculars on a hook beside the window.

I focused in on the tall, red-headed figure of Andrew MacDonald.