Steel Beach

Turned out the monster was perhaps too well trained. He flatly refused to do his business indoors, according to Liz, so we all set about stuffing him into his pressure suit.

Before long we were all reduced to hysterical laughter, the sort where you actually fall on the floor and roll around and start worrying about your own bladder. Winston wanted to cooperate, but as soon as we'd get his hind legs into the suit he'd start bouncing around in his eagerness and end up with the whole thing bunched around his neck. So Cricket scratched his back, which made the dog hold still and arch himself and lick his nose and we'd get his front legs in and maybe one of his back legs, and then he'd start that reflexive back leg jerking they do, and all was lost again. When we did get all four legs into the right holes he thought it was time, and we had to chase him and hold him down to get his air bottle strapped to his back, and at the last moment he took a dislike to his helmet and tried to eat it-this was a dog who made short work of steel bottlecaps, remember-and we had to put on a spare seal and test it before we finally screwed him in tight, shoved him in the lock, and cycled it.

Whereupon we laughed even harder at the spectacle of Winston ru

Later, I remember that Brenda and Liz were napping. I showed Cricket the wondrous curtain that turned the tent into two rooms. But he didn't get it, and suggested we suit up and take a walk outside. I was game, though it probably wasn't real wise considering I spent almost a minute trying to get my right foot into the left leg of my suit. But the things are practically foolproof. If Winston could handle one, I reasoned, how much trouble could I get into?

So who should come trotting up as soon as we emerged? I might have been in one sort of trouble right there, since he seemed to feel all bets were off now that Liz was sleeping, but after pressing his helmet to my leg and trying to sniff it and getting no results he sulked along behind us, probably wondering why everything out here smelled of plexi and dog slobber.

I really don't want to sound too gay here, switching from that time with Brenda to the hi-jinx of the Queen and her Consort. But that's the way it happened; you can't arrange your life to provide a consistent dramatic line, like a film script. It had rocked me, and I had no notion of how to deal with it except to hold Brenda and hope that maybe she would cry. I still don't.

My god. The horror that exists all around us, un-noticed.

I said something like that to her, with the half-formed feeling that maybe it would be good for her to approach it as a reporter.

"Did you ever wonder," I said, "why we spend all our time looking into these trivial stories, when stories like that are waiting to be told?"

"Like what?" she said, drowsily. To be frank, it hadn't been all that great for me, it never is with homosex, but she seemed to have enjoyed herself and that was the important part. You can always tell. Something glowed.

"Like what happened to you, dammit. Wouldn't you think, in this day and age, that we'd have put that sort of… of thing behind us?"

"I hate it when people say 'in this day and age.' What's so special about it? As opposed to, for instance, the day and age of the Egyptians?"

"If you can name even one of the Pharaohs I'll eat this tent."

"You're not going to make me mad, Hildy." She touched my face, looked in my eyes, then nestled against my neck. "You don't need to, don't you see that? this is the first and last time we'll ever be intimate. I know intimacy frightens you, but you don't need-"

"It does not fr-"

"Besides, give me another, oh, eighty-three years and I'll recite every Pharaoh from Akhenaton to Ramses."

"Ouch."

"It was in the program book. But this day and age is the only one I know right now, and I don't know why you should think it's any different from the day and age you grew up in. Were there child molesters back then?"

"You mean the early Neolithic? Yeah, there were."

"And you thought the steady march of progress would eliminate them any day now."

"It was a foolish thought. But it is a good story."

"You've been away from the Nipple too long, jerk. It's a terrible story. Who'd want to read a depressing story like that? I mean, that there's still child molesters? Everybody knows that. That's for sociologists, bless 'em. Now one story, one really gruesome one, that's news. My story is just a stat in the Sunday Supplement grinder; you can put it on file and run it once a year, they'll all have forgotten it by then."

"You sound so much like me it's scary."

"You know it, babe. People read the Nipple to get a little spice in their lives. They want to be titillated. Angered. Horrified. They don't want to be depressed. Walter's always talking about The End Of The World, how we'd cover it. Hell, I'd put it on the back page. It's depressing."

"You amaze me."

"I'll tell you what. I know more movie stars than everybody else in my school put together. They call me, the minor ones, anyway. I love my work. So don't tell me about the important stories we ought to be covering."

"That's why you got in the business? To meet celebrities?"

"Why did you get in the business?"

I didn't answer her then, but some vestigial concept of truth in media forces me to say that hob-nobbing with the glittering people may have had something to do with it.

But it really was amazing the changes a year had wrought in my little Brenda. I didn't think I liked it. Not that it was any of my business, but that's never stopped me in the past. At first I blamed the news racket itself, but thinking about it a bit more I wondered if maybe that injured little girl, that oh-so-good little girl who'd had herself sewed up rather than do what the nice lady suggested and turn daddy in to the bad people… I wondered if she might actually teach cynical old Hildy a thing or two about the bad old world and how to get by in it.

"I'm sorry about not bringing Buster."

"Huh? What's that?"

"Luna to Hildy, come in Hildy, over."

"Sorry, my mind was wandering." It was Cricket, and we were walking together on the surface. I even remembered going through the lock.

"I know I said I'd bring her so you could meet her, but she put up a big fuss because she wanted to go with some friends to Armstrong, so I let her."

Something in his voice made me suspect he wasn't telling the whole truth. I thought maybe he hadn't argued as hard as he might have. The only thing I really knew about his daughter was that he was very protective of her. I'd learned, through a little snooping, that none of his co-workers at the Shit had ever met her; he kept work and family strictly segregated.

Which is not unusual in Lunar society, we're very protective of the little privacy we have. But we'd known each other as man and woman for not even a week at that point, and already there had been a series of these signs that he… how should I put it?… was reluctant to let me deeper into his life. To put it another way, I'd been tentatively plucking at the daisy of devotion, and most of the petals were coming up he loves me not.

To be fair, I was un-used to being in love. I was out of practice at doing it, had never been adept at it, was wondering if I'd forgotten how to go about it. The last time I had really fallen, as they say, had been a teen-age crush, and I'd assumed lo these eighty years that it was an affliction visited solely on the young. So it could be that I wasn't communicating to him the tragic, hopeless depth of my longing. Maybe I wasn't sending out the right signals. He could be thinking, this is just old Hildy. Lot's o' laffs. This is probably just the way she is when she's female, all gooey and cow-eyed and anxious to bring me a hot cup of coffee in the morning and cuddle.