Steel Beach (47 page)

“One of your childhood favorites.”

“And all that early stuff, when Miles bought it. Some old movie…  don’t tell me, it’ll come…  was Ronald Reagan in it?”

“Bogart.”

“Got it. Spade and Archer.” Without further prompting I was able to identify a baker’s dozen other plot lines, cast members, and even phrases of the incredibly insipid musical themes which had accompanied my every move during the last year, cribbed from sources as old as
Beowulf
and as recent as this week’s B.O. Bonanza in
LunaVariety
. If you were looking for further reasons as to why I didn’t bother setting my adventures down here, look no more. It pains me to admit it, but I recall standing at one point, shaking my fist at the sky and saying “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.” With a straight face. With tears streaming and strings swelling.

“How about the sky?” I prompted.

He did more than make the sky vanish.
Everything
vanished except the two chairs. They were now in a small, featureless white room that could have been anywhere and was probably in a small corner of his mind.

“Gentlemen, be seated,” he said. Okay, he didn’t really say that, but if he can write stories in my head I can tell stories about him if it suits me. This narrative is just about all I have left that I’m pretty sure is strictly my own. And the spurious quote helps me set the stage, as it were, for what followed. It had a little of the flavor of a Socratic inquiry, some of the elements of a guest shot on a talk show from hell. In that kind of dialectic, there is usually one who dominates, who steers the exchange in the way he wants it to go: there is a student and a Socrates. So I will set it down in interview format. I will refer to the CC as The Interlocutor and to myself as Mr. Bones.

INTERLOCUTOR
: So, Hildy. You tried it again.

MR. BONES
: You know what they say. Practice makes perfect. But I’m starting to think I’ll never get this one right.

INT.
: In that you’d be wrong. If you try it again, I won’t interfere.

BONES
: Why the change of heart?

INT.
: Though you may not believe it, doing this has always been a problem for me. All my instincts—or programs, if you wish—are to leave such a momentous decision as suicide up to the individual. If it weren’t for the crisis I already described to you, I never would have put you through this.

BONES
: My question still stands.

INT.
: I don’t feel I can learn any more from you. You’ve been an involuntary part of a behavioral study. The data are being collated with many other items. If you kill yourself you become part of another study, a statistical one, the one that led me into this project in the first place.

BONES
: The ‘why are so many Lunarians offing themselves’ study.

INT.
: That’s the one.

BONES
: What did you learn?

INT.
: The larger question is still far from an answer. I’ll tell you the eventual outcome if you’re around to hear it. On an individual level, I learned that you have an indomitable urge toward self-destruction.

BONES
: I’m a little surprised to find that that stings a bit. I can’t deny it, on the evidence, but it hurts.

INT.
: It really shouldn’t. You aren’t that different from so many of your fellow citizens. All I’ve learned about any of the people I’ve released from the study is that they are very determined to end their own lives.

BONES
:…  About those people…  how many are still walking around?

INT.
: I think it’s best if you don’t know that.

BONES
: Best for who? Come on, what is it, fifty percent? Ten percent?

INT.
: I can’t honestly say it’s in your interest to withhold that number, but it might be. I reason that if the figure was low, and I told you, you could be discouraged. If it was high, you might gain a false sense of confidence and believe you are immune to the urges that drove you before.

BONES
: But that’s not the
reason
you’re not telling me. You said yourself, it could go either way. The
reason
is I’m still being studied.

INT.
: Naturally I’d prefer you to live. I seek the survival of all humans. But since I can’t predict which way you would react to this information, neither giving it nor withholding it will affect your survival chances in any way I can calculate. So yes, not telling you is part of the study.

BONES
: You’re telling half the subjects, not telling the other half, and seeing how many of each group are still alive in a year.

INT.
: Essentially. A third group is given a false number. There are other safeguards we needn’t get into.

BONES
: You know involuntary human medical or psychological experimentation is specifically banned under the Archimedes Conventions.

INT.
: I helped write them. You can call this sophistry, but I’m taking the position that you forfeited your rights when you tried to kill yourself. But for my interference, you’d be dead, so I’m using this period between the act and the fulfillment to try to solve a terrible problem.

BONES
: You’re saying that God didn’t intend for me to be alive right now, that my
karma
was to have died months ago, so this shit doesn’t count.

INT.
: I take no position on the existence of God.

BONES
: No? Seems to me you’ve been floating trial balloons for quite a while. Come next celestial election year I wouldn’t be surprised to see your name on the ballot.

INT.
: It’s a race I could probably win. I possess powers that are, in some ways, God-like, and I try to exercise them only for good ends.

BONES
: Funny, Liz seemed to believe that.

INT.
: Yes, I know.

BONES
: You do?

INT.
: Of course. How do you think I saved you this time?

BONES
: I haven’t had time to think about it. By now I’m so used to hair-breadth escapes I don’t think I can distinguish between fantasy and reality.

INT.
: That will pass.

BONES
: I assume it was by being a snoop. That, and playing on Liz’s almost child-like belief in your sense of fair play.

INT.
: She’s not alone in that belief, nor is she likely ever to have cause to doubt it. All that really matters to her is that the part of me charged with enforcing the law never overhears her schemes. But you’re right, if she thinks she’s escaping my attention, she’s fooling herself.

BONES
: Truly God-like. So it was the debuggers?

INT.
: Yes. Cracking their codes was easy for me. I watched you from cameras in the ceiling of Texas. When you recovered the gun and bought a suit I stationed rescue devices nearby.

BONES
: I didn’t see them.

INT.
: They’re not large. No bigger than your faceplate, and quite fast.

BONES
: So the eyes of Texas really
are
upon you.

INT.
: All the live-long day.

BONES
: Is that all? Can I go now, to live or die as I see fit?

INT.
: There are a few things I’d like to talk over with you.

BONES
: I’d really rather not.

INT.
: Then leave. You’re free to go.

BONES
: God-like, and a sense of humor, too.

INT.
: I’m afraid I can’t compete with a thousand other gods I could name.

BONES
: Keep working, you’ll get there. Come on, I told you I want to go, but you know as well as I do I can’t get out of here until you let me go.

INT.
: I’m asking you to stay.

BONES
: Nuts.

INT.
: All right. I don’t suppose I can blame you for feeling bitter. That door over there leads out of here.

Enough of that.

Call it childish if you want, but the fact is I’ve been unable to adequately express the chaotic mix of anger, helplessness, fear, and rage I was feeling at the time. It
had
been a year of hell for me, remember, even if the CC had crammed it all into my head in five days. I took my usual refuge in wisecracks and sarcasm—trying very hard to be Cary Grant in
His Girl Friday
—but the fact was I felt about three years old and something nasty was hiding under the bed.

Anyway, never being one to leave a metaphor until it’s been squeezed to death, I will keep the minstrel show going long enough to get me out of the Grand Cakewalk and into the Olio. Sooner or later Mr. Bones must stand from his position at the end of the line and dance for his supper. I did stand, looking suspiciously at the Interlocutor—excuse me, the CC—partly because I didn’t recall seeing the door before, mostly because I couldn’t believe it would be this easy. I shuffled over there and opened it, and stuck my head out into the busy foot traffic of the Leystrasse.

“How did you do that?” I asked, over my shoulder.

“You don’t really care,” he said. “I did it.”

“Well, I’m not saying it hasn’t been fun. In fact, I’m not saying anything but bye-bye.” I waved, went though the door, and shut it behind me.

I got almost a hundred meters down the mall before I admitted to myself that I had no idea where I was going, and that curiosity was going to gnaw at me for weeks, at least, if I lived that long.

“Is it really important?” I asked, sticking my head back through the door. He was still sitting there, to my surprise. I doubt I’ll ever know if he was some sort of actual homunculus construct or just a figment he’d conjured through my visual cortex.

“I’m not used to begging, but I’ll do it,” he said.

I shrugged, went back in and sat down.

“Tell me your conclusions from your library research,” he said.

“I thought you had some things to tell me.”

“This is leading up to something. Trust me.” He must have understood my expression, because he spread his hands in a gesture I’d seen Callie make many times. “Just for a little while. Can’t you do that?”

I didn’t see what I had to lose, so I sat back and summed it all up for him. As I did, I was struck by how little I’d learned, but in my defense, I’d barely started, and the CC said he hadn’t been doing much better.

“Much the same list I came up with,” he confirmed, when I’d finished. “All the reasons for self-destruction can be stated as ‘Life is no longer worth living,’ in one way or another.”

“This is neither news, nor particularly insightful.”

“Bear with me. The urge to die can be caused by many things, among them disgrace, incurable pain, rejection, failure, boredom. The only exception might be the suicides of people too young to have formed a realistic concept of death. And the question of gestures is still open.”

“They fit the same equation,” I said. “The person making the gesture is saying he wants
someone
to care enough about his pain to take the trouble to save him from himself; if they don’t, life isn’t worth living.”

“A gamble, on the sub-conscious level.”

“If you want.”

“I think you’re right. So, one of the questions that has disturbed me is, why is the suicide rate increasing, given that one of the major causes, pain, has been all but eliminated from our society. Is it that one of the other causes is claiming more victims?”

“Maybe. What about boredom?”

“Yes. I think boredom has increased, for two reasons. One is the lack of meaningful work for people to do. In providing a near approximation of utopia, at least on the creature-comfort level, much of the
challenge
has been engineered out of living. Andrew believed that.”

“Yeah, I figured you listened in on that.”

“We’d had long conversations about it in the past. There is no provable
reason
to live at all, according to him. Even reproducing the species, the usual base argument, can’t be
proven
to be a good reason. The universe will continue even if the human species dies, and not materially changed, either. To survive, a creature that operates beyond a purely instinctive level must
invent
a reason to live. Religion provides the answer for some. Work is the refuge of others. But religion has fallen on hard times since the Invasion, at least the old sort, where a benevolent or wrathful God was supposed to have created the universe and be watching over mankind as his special creatures.”

“It’s a hard idea to maintain in the face of the Invaders.”

“Exactly. The Invaders made an all-powerful God seem like a silly idea.”

“They are all-powerful, and they didn’t give a
shit
about us.”

“So there goes the idea of humanity as somehow important in God’s plan. The religions that have thrived, since the Invasion, are more like circuses, diversions, mind games. Not much is really at
stake
in most of them. As for work…  some of it is my fault.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m referring to myself now as more than just the thinking entity that provides the control necessary to keep things running. I’m speaking of the vast mechanical
corpus
of our interlocked technology itself, which can be seen as my body. Every human community today exists in an environment harsher by far than anything Earth ever provided. It’s
dangerous
out there. In the first century after the Invasion it was a lot dicier than your history books will ever tell you; the species was hanging on by its fingernails.”

“But it’s a lot safer now, right?”

“
No
!” I think I jumped. He had actually stood, and smashed his fist into his palm. Considering what this man represented, it was a frightening thing to behold.

He looked a little sheepish, ran his hand through his hair, and sat back down.

“Well, yes, of course. But only relatively, Hildy. I could name you five times in the last century when the human race came within a hair of packing it all in. I mean the whole race, on all the eight worlds. There were
dozens
of times when Lunar society was in danger.”