John Varley - Steel Beach

But enough unsuccessful and unplanned and un- understood suicide attempts focuses the mind wonderfully. I realized that if I didn't do it now, I might never do it. And it was the one major human experience I could think of that I might want to have and had not had. And, as I said, I'd been looking for a sign, O Lord, and this seemed like one. A bolt from the blue, not on the order of the Girl and Butterfly, but a portent all the same.

Which simply meant that every Friday on my way to Delambre I gave serious thought to stopping off and having the damn thing taken care of, and every time, so far, had elected to keep it, not exactly by a landslide.

There's an old wives' tale that a pregnant woman should not visit the surface. If that's true, why do they make maternity suits? The only danger is of coming into labor while in the suit, and that's not much of a danger. An ambulance can get you from any point on Luna to a birthing center in twenty minutes. That was not a concern to me. Nor was I neglecting my duties as an incubator. I got roaring drunk that once, but that's easily cured. Each Wednesday I visited a check-up center and was told things were cooking nicely. Each Thursday I dropped by Ned Pepper's office and, if he was sober enough, let him poke me and thump me and pronounce me as fine a heifer as he'd ever come across, and sell me a bottle of yellow elixir which did wonders for my struggling rose bushes.

If I kept it to term, I intended to bear it naturally. (It was a male, but it seems silly to think of an embryo as having a sex.) When I was about twenty it seemed for a while that birthing was soon to be a thing of the past. The large majority of women were rearing their pups in jars, often prominently displayed on the living room coffee table. I watched many a neighbor's blastocyst mature over the years, peering into the scope with all the enthusiasm one usually brings to viewing Uncle Luigi's holos of his trip to Mars. I watched many a mother scratching the bottle and cooing and goo-gooing to her second-trimester fetus. I was present at a few de-cantings, which were often elaborately catered, with hired bands and wrapped presents and the whole megillah .

As is so often the case, it was a fad, not a tide of civilization. Some studies came out suggesting that Screwtops did less well in later life than Bellybusters. Other studies showed the opposite. Studies frequently do that.

I don't read studies. I go with my gut. The pendulum had swung back toward the "healthy mother/child bonding of vaginal delivery" and against the "birth trauma scars a child for life" folks, but my gut told me that, given that I should do this at all, my gut was the proper place for it to grow. And now that my uterus has been heard from, I will thank it to shut up.

The frames recording the girl's appearance and subsequent seeming exit from this dimensional plane revealed several interesting things. She had not materialized out of thin vacuum nor had she fallen out of and back into a black hole. There were images before, and after.

I couldn't make a thing of them, given the low light and the mysterious nature of the transubstantiation. But that's what computers are for. My five-and-dime model chewed on the images of twisted light for a while, and came up with the notion that a human body, wrapped in a perfect flexible mirror, would twist light in just such a way. All you'd see would be distorted reflections of the person's surroundings, so while not rendering one invisible, it sure would make you hard to see. Up close it would be possible to make out a human shape, if you were looking for it. From a distance, forget it. If she stood still, especially against a background as shattered as the Delambre junkyard, there would be no way to find her. I remembered the nagging headache I'd had shortly before her little show. She'd been around before she decided to reveal herself to me.

A search of the library found no technology that could produce anything like what I had observed. Whatever it was, it could be turned off and on very quickly; my holocam's shutter speed was well below a thousandth of a second, and she was wrapped in the mirror in one frame, naked in the next. She didn't take it off, she turned it off.

Looking for an explanation of the other singular thing about her, the ability to run nude, even if for only seven steps, in a vacuum, produced a few tidbits concerning the implantation of oxygen sources to dispense directly into the bloodstream, research that had never borne profitable fruit and had been abandoned as impractical. Hmmmm.

I put myself through a refresher course in vacuum survival. People have lived after exposure of up to four minutes, which is when the brain starts to die. They suffer significant tissue damage, but so what? Infants have lived after even longer periods. You can do useful work for maybe a minute, maybe a bit longer, work like scrambling into an emergency suit. Exposures of five to ten seconds will likely rupture your eardrums and certainly hurt like hell, but do you no other real harm. "The bends" is easily treatable.

So wait a minute, what's all this talk about a miracle? I determined in fairly short order that what I'd seen was almost surely a technical marvel, not a supernatural one. And I was a bit relieved, frankly. Gods are capricious characters, and the biggest part of me had no desire to have it proved that one really existed. What if you saw your burning bush and it turned out the Power behind it was a psychopathic child, like the Christian God? He's God, right? He's proved it and you've got to do what he tells you to do. So what if he asks you to sacrifice your son on an altar to His massive ego, or build a big boat in your back yard, or pimp your wife to the local honcho, blackmail him, and give him a dose of clap? (Don't believe me? Genesis 12: 10-20. You learn the most interesting things in church.)

It didn't diminish the miracle one bit to know it was probably man-made. It excited me all the more. Somewhere out there, in that huge junkyard, somebody was doing things nobody else knew how to do. And if it wasn't in the library, the CC probably didn't know about it, either. Or if he did, he was suppressing it, and if so, why?

All I knew was I wanted to talk to whoever had made it possible for that little girl to wrap herself in a perfect mirror and make a face at me.

Which was easier said than done.

The first four weekends I simply camped out, did very little exploring. I was hoping, since she'd come to me once, she'd do it again. No real reason why she should, but again, why not?

After that I spent more time in my suit. I climbed a few alps of rubble, but there didn't seem much point in it after the first few. It stretched as far as the eye could see; there was no way to search it, or even a small part of it.

No, it seemed to me it was no coincidence the sighting had come at the base of that monument to high hopes, the Starship Robert A. Heinlein . I set about to explore as much of the old hulk as I could, but first I visited the library again and learned something of his history. Herewith, in brief, is the saga of failed dreams:

The Heinlein was first proposed in 2010, by a group known as the L5 Society. It was to be humanity's first interstellar vessel, a remarkable idea when you consider that the Lunar colony at the time was quite small, still struggling year to year for funding. And it was to be another twenty years before the keel was laid, at L5, one of the Trojan libration points of the Earth/Luna system. L5 and L4 enjoyed several decades of prominence before the Invasion, and thrived for almost forty years afterwards. Today they are orbiting junkyards. Economic reasons again.

The ship was half completed when the Invaders came. Work was naturally abandoned in favor of more pressing projects, like survival of the species. When that seemed assured, there was still very little effort to spare for blue-sky projects like the Heinlein .