Steel Beach (28 page)

“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 nonplussed. 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.