Steel Beach (27 page)

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-yearold 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 trump 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 backfeed, 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 prototypical 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.