Steel Beach

The floor was mostly rock and dirt shaped into hills and two mountains. The one he'd called Mount Hood was tall and sharply pointed. The other was truncated and looked unfinished.

"That's going to be a volcano," he said. "Or at least a good approximation of an active volcano. There was an eruption in this area in historic times."

"You mean lava and fire and smoke?"

"I wish we could. But the power requirements to melt enough rock for a worthwhile eruption would bust the budget, plus any really good volume of smoke would hurt the trees and wildlife. What it's going to do is vent steam three or four times a day and shoot sparks at night. Should be real pretty. The project manager's trying to convince the money people to fund a yearly ash plume-nothing catastrophic, it actually benefits the trees. And I'm pretty sure we'll be able to mount a modest lava flow every ten or twenty years."

"I wish I could see it better. It's pretty dim in here." The only real light sources were at the scattered tree farms, dots of bright green in the blasted landscape.

"Let me get the sun turned on." He picked up a mike and talked to the power section, and a few minutes later the "sun" flickered and then blazed directly overhead.

"All this will be covered in virgin forest; green as far as the eye can see. Not at all like your shack in Texas. This is a wet, cool climate, lots of snow in higher elevations. Mostly conifers. We're even putting in a grove of sequoias down in the south part, though we're fudging a bit on that, geographically speaking."

"Green'd be a lot better than this," I said.

"You'll never be a true West Texan, Hildy," he told me, and smiled.

He set us down on the Columbia River, at the mouth of the gorge where it was wider and slower, on a broad, flat sandbar of an island which was the center of what he called an ecological test-bed. The beach was wide and hard-packed, full of frozen ripples. Across the river were the advertised pine trees, but near us there was only estuarine vegetation, the sort of plants that didn't mind being flooded periodically. It ran to tall ski

We spread out a blanket on the sand and sat there gorging ourselves on the food. He stuck mostly to the shrimpoid tempura while I concentrated on the maguro, uni, hamachi, toro, tako and paper-thin slices of fugu. I dredged each piece in enough of that wonderful green horseradish to make my nose run and my ears turn bright red. Then we made love again, slow and tender for the first hour, unusual for Fox, only getting intense near the end. We stretched out in the sun and never quite fell asleep, just lolling like satiated reptiles. At least I hadn't thought I was asleep until Fox woke me by flipping me over onto my stomach and entering me without any warning. (No, not that way. Fox likes to initiate it and he likes it rough, but he's not into giving pain and I'm not into receiving it.) Anyway, these things even out. When Fox was a girl she usually forced herself down on me before she was quite ready. Maybe he thought all girls liked it that way. I didn't enlighten him, because I didn't mind it that much and the love-making that followed was always Olympic quality.

And afterwards…

There's always an afterwards. Perhaps that's why my ten years with Fox was the longest relationship I ever had. After the sex, most of them want to talk to you, and I always had trouble finding people I wanted to talk to as well as have sex with. Fox was the exception. So afterwards…

I put the remains of my clothing back on. The dress was severely ripped; I couldn't get it to stay over my left breast, and there were gaping holes here and there. It suited my mood. We walked along the river's edge in water that never covered our feet. I was playing the castaway game. This time I could pretend to be a rich socialite in the tatters of her fancy gown, desperately seeking good native help. I trailed my toes in the water as I walked.

This place was timeless and unreal in a way Scarpa Island never was. The sun still hung there at high noon. I picked up a handful of sand and peered at it, and it was just as detailed as the imaginary sand of my year-long mental environment. It smelled different. It was riverine sand, not white coral, and the water was fresh instead of salty, with a different set of microscopic lifeforms in it. The water was warmer than the Pacific waters. Hell, it was quite hot in Oregon, into the lower forties. Something to do with the construction. We had both dripped sweat all day. I had licked it off his body and found it quite tasty. Not so much the sweat as the body I licked it from.

The setting could not have been more perfect if I'd picked it myself. Say, Fox, this place reminds me of an odd little adventure I had one day about a week ago, between 15:30.0002 P.M. and around, oh, let's say 15:30.0009. And isn't it amazing how times flies when you're having fun.

So I said something a little less puzzling than that, and gradually told him the story. Right up to the punch line, at which point I gagged on it.

Fox wasn't as reticent as Callie.

"I've heard of the technique, of course," he said. "I ought to be surprised you hadn't, but I guess you still shy away from technology, just like you used to."

"It's not very relevant to my job. Or my life."

"That's what you thought. It must seem more relevant now."

"Granted. It's never jumped up and bit me before."

"That's what I can't figure. What you describe is a radical treatment for mental problems. I can't imagine the CC using it on you without your consent unless you had something seriously wrong with you."

He let that hang, and once more I gagged. Give Fox points for candor; he didn't let a little thing like my obvious humiliation stand in his way.

"So what is your problem?" he asked, artless as a three-year-old.

"What's the penalty for littering in here?" I said.

"Go ahead. This whole area will be re-landscaped before the public gets to track things in with their muddy feet."

I took off the ruined dress and balled it up as well as I could. I hurled it out toward the water. It ballooned, fell into the gentle current. We watched it float for a short distance, soak up water, and hang up on the bottom. Fox had said you could walk a hundred meters out from the island and not be in much deeper than your knees. After that it got deep quickly. We had come to the point where the island ended at the upstream end. We stood on the last little bit of sand and watched the current nudge the dress an inch at a time. I drew a ragged breath and felt a tear run down my cheek.

"If I'd known you felt that way about the dress, I'd never have torn it." When I glanced at him he took the tear on the tip of his finger and licked the finger with his tongue. I smiled weakly. I walked out into the water, heading upstream, and could hear him following behind me.

Some of it was the hormonal shock, I'm sure. I don't cry much, and no more when I'm female than when male. The change probably released it, and it felt right; it was time to cry. It was time to admit how frightened I was by the whole thing.

I sat down in the warm water. It didn't cover my legs. I started working my hands into the sand on each side of me.

"It seems that I keep trying to kill myself," I said.

He was standing beside me. I looked up at him, wiped away another tear. God, he looked good. I wanted to move to him, make him ready again with my mouth, recline on this watery bed and have him move inside me with the slow, gentle rhythms of the river. Was that a life-affirming urge, or a death wish, metaphorically speaking? Was I in the river of life, or was I fantasizing about becoming part of the detritus that all rivers sweep eternally to the sea? There was no sea at the end of this river, just a deeper, saltier growing biome for the salmon that would soon teem here, struggling upstream to die. The sky the sun would wester and die in was a painted backdrop. Did the figures of speech of Old Earth still pertain here?