Steel Beach (29 page)

I showered and bought a paper chemise in the locker room, staggered to the tube terminal, and got aboard. I fell asleep on the way home, and the train had to wake me up.

I’ve read about hangovers. You just about have to believe those people were exaggerating. If only a tenth of the things written about them were true, I have no desire to experience one. The hangover was cured long before I was born, just a simple chemical matter, really, no tough science involved. I’d sometimes wondered if that was a good idea. There’s an almost biblical belief deep in the human psyche that we should pay in some way for our over-indulgences. But when I think that, my rational side soon takes over. Might as well wish for the return of the hemorrhoid.

When I woke up the next morning, my mouth tasted good.

Too good.

“CC, on line,” quoth I.

“What can I do for you?”

“What’s with the peppermint?”

“I thought you liked peppermint. I can change the flavor.”

“There’s nothing wrong with peppermint
qua
peppermint. It’s just passing strange to wake up with my mouth tasting like
anything
but…  well, it wouldn’t mean anything to you, I don’t guess taste is one of your talents, but take my word for it, it’s vile.”

“You asked me to work on that. I did.”

“Just like that?”

“Why not?”

I was about to answer, but Fox stirred in his sleep and turned over, so I got out of bed and went into the bathroom. I had shaken out a tooth cleaning pill, then I looked at it sitting there in my hand.

“Do I need this, then?”

“No. It’s gone the way of the toothbrush.”

“And science marches on. You know, I’m used to what they call future shock, but I’m not used to being the cause of it.”

“Humans usually are the cause of the new inventions.”

“You said that.”

“But you can never tell when a human will take the time to work on a particular problem. Now, I have no talent for asking questions like that. As you noted, my mouth never tastes bad in the morning, so why should I? But I have a lot of excess capacity, and when a question like that is asked, I often tinker with it and sometimes come up with a solution. In this case, I synthesized a nanobot that goes after the things that would normally rot in your mouth while you are sleeping, and changes them into things that taste good. They also clean away plaque and tartar and have a beneficial effect on gums.”

“I’m afraid to ask how you slipped this stuff to me.”

“It’s in the water supply. You don’t need much of it.”

“So every Lunarian is waking up today and tasting peppermint?”

“It comes in six delicious flavors.”

“Are you writing your own ad campaigns now? Do me a favor; don’t tell anyone this is my fault.”

I got into the shower and it turned on, gradually warming to just a degree below the hottest I could stand. Don’t ever say anything about showers, Hildy, I cautioned myself. The goddamn CC might find a way to clean the human hide without them, and I think I’d go mad without my morning shower. I’m a singer in the shower. Lovers have told me I do this with indifferent esthetic effect, but it pleases me. As I soaped myself I thought about a nanobot-infested world.

“CC. What would happen if all those tiny little robots were taken out of my body?”

“Doing it would be impractical, to say the least.”

“Hypothetically.”

“You would be hypothetically dead within a year.”

I dropped the soap. I don’t know what answer I had expected, but it hadn’t been that.

“Are you serious?”

“You asked. I replied.”

“Well…  
shit
. You can’t just leave it lying there.”

“I suppose not. Then let me list the reasons in order. First, you are prone to cancer. Billions of manufactured organisms work night and day seeking out and eating pinpoint tumors throughout your body. They find one almost every day. If left unchecked, they would soon eat you alive. Second, Alzheimer’s Disease.”

“What the hell is that?”

“A syndrome associated with aging. Simply put, it eats away at your brain cells. Most human beings, upon reaching their hundredth birthday in a natural state, would have contracted it. This is an example of the reconstructive work constantly going on in your body. Failing brain cells are excised and duplicated with healthy ones so the neural net is not disrupted. You would have forgotten your name and how to find your way home years ago; the disease started showing up about the time you went to work at the
Nipple
.”

“Hah! Maybe those things didn’t do as good a job as you thought. That would go a long way toward explaining…  never mind. There’s more?”

“Lung disease. The air in the warrens is not actually healthy for human life. Things get concentrated, things that could be cleaned from the air are not, because replacing lungs is so much cheaper and simpler than cleaning up the air. You could live in a disneyland to offset this; I must filter the air much more rigorously in there. As it is, several hundred alveoli are re-built in your lungs every day. Without the nanobots, you’d soon begin to miss them.”

“Why didn’t anyone ever tell me about all this?”

“What does it matter? If you’d researched it you could have found out; it’s not a secret.”

“Yeah, but…  I thought those kind of things had been engineered out of the body. Genetically.”

“A popular misconception. Genes are certainly manipulable, but they’ve proved resistant to some types of changes, without…  unacceptable alterations in the gestalt, the body, they produce and define.”

“Can you put that more plainly?”

“It’s difficult. It can be explained in terms of some very complicated mathematical theories having to do with chaotic effects and chemical holography. There’s often no single gene for this or that characteristic, good or bad. It’s more of an interference pattern produced by the overlapping effects of a number of genes, sometimes a very large number. Tampering with one produces unintended side-effects, and tampering with them all is often impossible without producing unwanted changes. Bad genes are bound up this way as often as good ones. In your case, if I eradicated the faulty genes that insist on producing cancers in your body, you’d no longer be Hildy. You’d be a healthier person, but not a wiser one, and you’d lose a lot of abilities and outlooks that, counterproductive though they may be in a purely practical sense, I suspect you treasure.”

“What makes me me.”

“Yes. You know there are many things I can change about you without affecting your…  soul is the simplest word to use, though it’s a hazy one.”

“It’s the first one you’ve used that I understand.” I chewed on that for a while, shutting off the shower and stepping out, dripping wet, reaching for a towel, drying myself.

“It doesn’t make sense to me that things like cancer should be in the genes. It sounds contra-survival.”

“From an evolutionary viewpoint, anything that doesn’t kill you before you’ve become old enough to reproduce is irrelevant to species survival. There’s even a philosophic point of view that says cancer and things like it are good for the race. Overpopulation can be a problem to a very successful species. Cancer gets the old ones out of the way.”

“They’re not getting out the way now.”

“No. It will be a problem someday.”

“When?”

“Don’t worry about it. Ask me again at the Tricentennial. As a preliminary measure, large families are now being discouraged, the direct opposite of the ethic that prevailed after the Invasion.”

I wanted to hear more, but I noticed the time, and had to hustle to get ready in time to catch my train.

Tranquility Base is by far the biggest tourist attraction on Luna, and the reason is its historical significance, since it is the spot where a human foot first trod another planet. Right? If you thought that, maybe I could interest you in some prime real estate on Ganymede with a great view of the volcano. The real draw at Tranquility is just over the horizon and goes by the name of Armstrong Park. Since the park is within the boundaries of Apollo Planetary Historical Preserve, the Lunar Chamber of Commerce can boast that X million people visit the site of the first Lunar landing every year, but the ads feature the roller coaster, not the LEM.

A good number of those tourists do find the time to ride the train over to the Base itself and spend a few minutes gazing at the forlorn little lander, and an hour hurrying through the nearby museum, where most of the derelict space hardware from 1960 to the Invasion is on display. Then the kids begin to whine that they’re bored, and by then the parents probably are, too, and it’s back to the land of over-priced hot dogs and not-so-cheap thrills.

You can’t take a train directly to the base. No accident, that. It dumps you at the foot of the thirty-story explosion of lights that is the sign for and entrance to the Terminal Seizure, what the ads call “The Greatest SphincterTightener in the Known Universe.” I got on it once, against my better judgment, and I guarantee it will show you things they didn’t tell you about in astronaut school. It’s a twenty-minute MagLev, six-gee, free trajectory descent into the tenth circle of Hell that guarantees one blackout and seven gray hairs or your money back. It’s actually two coasters—the Grand Mal and the Petit Mal—one of them obviously for wimps. They are prepared to hose out the Grand Mal cars after every ride. If you understand the attraction of that, please don’t come to my home to explain it to me. I’m armed, and considered dangerous.

I walked as quickly as I could past the sign—30,000,000 (Count ’Em!) Thirty Million Lights!—and noticed the two-hour line for the Grand Mal ride was cleverly concealed from the ticket booth. I made it to the shuttle train, having successfully avoided the blandishments of a thousand hucksters selling everything from inflatable Neil dolls to talking souvenir pencil sharpeners to put a point on your souvenir pencils. I boarded the train, removed a hunk of cotton candy from a seat, and sat. I was wearing a disposable paper jumper, so what the hell?

The Base itself is an area large enough to play a game of baseball/6. Those guys never got very far from their ship, so it made no sense to preserve any more of the area. It is surrounded by a stadium-like structure, un-roofed, that is four levels of viewing area with all the windows facing inward. On top is an un-pressurized level.

I elbowed my way through the throngs of camera toting tourists from Pluto and made it to the suit rental counter. Oh, dear.

If I ever had to choose one sex to be for the rest of my life, I would be female. I think the body is better-designed, and the sex is a little better. But there is one thing about the female body that is distinctly inferior to the male—and I’ve talked to others about this, both Changers and dedicated females, and ninety-five percent agree with me—and that is urination. Males are simply better at it. It is less messy, the position is more dignified, and the method helps develop hand-eye coordination and a sense of artistic expression,
à la
writing your name in the snow.

But what the hell, right? It’s never really much of an annoyance…  until you go to rent a p-suit.

Almost three hundred years of engineering have come up with three basic solutions to the problem: the catheter, suction devices, and…  oh, dear lord, the diaper. Some advocate a fourth way: continence. Try it the next time you go on a twelve-hour hike on the surface. The catheter was by far the best. It is painless, as advertised…  but I
hate
the damn thing. It just feels wrong. Besides, like the suckers, they get dislodged. Next time you need a laugh, watch a woman trying to get her UroLator back in place. It could start a new dance craze.

I’ve never owned a p-suit. Why spend the money, when you need it once a year? I’ve rented a lot of them, and they
all
stank. No matter how they are sterilized, some odors of the previous occupant will linger. It’s bad enough in a man’s suit, but for real gut-wrenching stench you have to put on the female model. They all use the suction method, with a diaper as a back-up. At a place like Tranquility, where the turnover is rapid and the help likely to be under-paid, unconcerned, and slipshod, some of the niceties will be overlooked from time to time. I was once handed a suit that was still wet.

I got into this one and sniffed cautiously; not too bad, though the perfume was cheap and obvious. I switched it on and let the staff put it through a perfunctory safety check, and remembered the other thing I didn’t like about the suction method. All that air flowing by can chill the vulva something fierce.

There were surgical methods of improving the interface, but I found them ugly, and they didn’t make sense unless your work took you outside regularly. The rest of us just had to breathe shallowly and bear it, and try not to drink too much coffee before an excursion.

The air lock delivered me onto the roof, which was not crowded at all. I found a place at the rail far from anyone else, and waited. I turned off my suit radio, all but the emergency beacon.

I said, “CC, what do I get out of it?”

The CC is pretty good at picking up a conversation hours, weeks, and even years old, but the question was pretty vague.

He took a stab at it.

“You mean the morning mouth preparation?”

“Yeah. I thought it up. You did the work, but then you gave it away without consulting me. Shouldn’t there be a way to make some money out of it?”

“It’s defined as a health benefit, so its production cost will be added to the health tax all Lunarians pay, plus a small profit, which will go to you. It won’t make you rich.”

“And no one gets to choose. They get it whether they like it or not.”

“If they object, I have an antibot available. No one has so far.”

“Still sounds like a subversive plot to me. If the drinking water ain’t pure, what is?”

“Hildy, there’s so many things in the King City municipal water you could practically lift it with a magnet.”

“All for our own good.”

“You seem to be in a sour mood.”

“Why should I be? My mouth tastes wonderful.”