John Varley - Steel Beach

"Why, indeed. It's a milestone, certainly, but it doesn't really mean anything. Right?"

"Right."

"Anyway, to get back to the question… there were always those who felt that, with natural evolutionary processes no longer working, we should make some attempt to foster a certain amount of aggressiveness. Without sanctioning real killing, we could at least learn how to fight. So boxing was re-introduced, and that eventually led to the blood sports you see today."

"This is just the sort of perspective Walter wants," I pointed out.

"Yes. I didn't say I didn't have the perspective you need. I'm just curious as to why I should use it for you."

"I've been thinking that one over, too," I said. "Just as an exercise, you understand. And you know, I can't think of anything that's likely to convince a man in the middle of a protracted suicide to put it off for a year and join us in writing a series of useless stories."

"I used to be a reporter, you know."

"No, I didn't."

"Is that what you think I'm doing? Committing suicide?"

Brenda looked at him earnestly. I could almost feel her concern.

"If you get killed in the ring, that's what they'll call it," she said.

He got up and went to a small bar at the side of the room. Without asking what we wanted, he poured three glasses of a pale green liqueur and brought them back to us. Brenda sniffed it, tasted, then took a longer drink.

"You can't imagine the sense of defeatism after the Invasion," he said. It was apparently impossible to keep him on any subject, so I relaxed to the inevitable. As a reporter you learn to let the subject talk.

"To call it a war is a perversion of the word. We fought, I suppose, in the sense that ants fight when the hill is kicked over. I suppose ants can fight valiantly in such a situation, but it hardly matters to the man who kicked the hill. He barely notices what he has done. He may not even have had any actual malice toward ants; it might have been an accident, or a side-effect of another project, like plowing a field. We were plowed under in a single day.

"Those of us here in Luna were in a state of shock. In a way, that state of shock lasted many decades. In a way… it's still with us today."

He took another drag on his cheroot.

"I'm one of those who was alarmed at the non-violence movement. It's great, as an ideal, but I feel it leaves us in a dead end, and vulnerable."

"You mean evolution?" Brenda asked.

"Yes. We shape ourselves genetically now, but are we really wise enough to know what to select for? For a billion years the selection was done naturally. I wonder if it's wise to junk a system that worked for so long."

"Depends on what you mean by 'worked,'" I said.

"Are you a nihilist?"

I shrugged.

"All right. Worked, in the sense that life forms got more complex. Biology seemed to be working toward something. We know it wasn't us-the Invaders proved there are things out there a lot smarter than we are. But the Invaders were gas giant beings, they must have evolved on a planet like Jupiter. We're hardly even related. It's commonly accepted that the Invaders came to Earth to save the dolphins and whales from our pollution. I don't know of any proof of that, but what the hell. Suppose it's true. That means the aquatic mammals have brains organized more like the Invaders than like us. The Invaders don't see us as truly intelligent, any more than other engineering species, like bees, or corals, or birds. True or not, the Invaders don't really have to concern us anymore. Our paths don't cross; we have no interests in common. We're free to pursue our own destiny… but if we don't evolve, we don't have a destiny."

He looked from one of us to the other and back again. This seemed pretty important to him. Personally, I'd never given much thought to the matter.

"There's something else," he went on. "We know there are aliens out there. We know space travel is possible. The next time we meet aliens they could be even worse than the Invaders. They might want to exterminate us, rather than just evict us. I think we ought to keep some fighting skills alive in case we meet some disagreeable critters we can fight."

Brenda sat up, wide-eyed.

"You're a Heinleiner," she said.

It was MacDonald's turn to shrug.

"I don't attend services, but I agree with a lot of what they say. But we were talking about martial arts."

Is that what we were talking about? I'd lost track.

"Those arts were lost for almost a century. I spent ten years studying thousands of films from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and I pieced them back together. I spent another twenty years teaching myself until I felt I was adept. Then I became a slash boxer. So far, I'm undefeated. I expect to remain that way until someone else duplicates my techniques."

"That would be a good subject for an article," Brenda suggested. "Fighting, then and now. People used to have all kinds of weapons, right? Projectile weapons, I mean. Ordinary citizens could own them."

"There was one country in the twentieth century that made their possession almost mandatory. It was a civil right, the right to own firearms. One of the weirder civil rights in human history, I always thought. But I'd have owned one, if I'd lived there. In an armed society, the unarmed man must be a pretty nervous fellow."

"It's not that I don't find all this perfectly fascinating," I said, standing and stretching my arms and legs to get the circulation going again. "I don't, but that's beside the point. We've been here about half an hour, and already Brenda has suggested plenty of topics you could be helpful with. Hell, you could write them yourself, if you remember how. So how about it? Are you interested, or should we start looking for someone else?"

He leaned his elbows on his knees and looked at me.

Before long I began to wonder when the theremin music would begin. A look like that belonged in a horror holo. Eyes like that should be set in a face that begins to sprout hair and fangs, or twist like putty into some Nameless Evil Thing. I mentioned before how deep his eyes seemed. They had been reflecting pools compared to this.

I don't wish to be superstitious. I don't wish to attribute powers to MacDonald simply because he had attained a venerable age. But, looking at those eyes, one could not help but think of all the things they had seen, and wonder at the wisdom that might have been attained. I was one hundred years old, which is nothing to sneer at in the longevity department, or hadn't been until recent human history, but I felt like a child being judged by his grandfather, or maybe by God himself.

I didn't like it.

I tried my best to return the gaze-and there was nothing hostile in it, no challenge being issued to me. If a staring match was in progress, I was the only one competing. But before long I had to turn away. I studied the walls, the floor, I looked at Brenda and smiled at her-which startled her, I think. Anything to avoid those eyes.

"No," he said, at last. "I don't think I'll join this project, after all. I'm sorry to have wasted your time."

"No problem," I said, and got up and started for the door.

"What do you mean, 'after all,'" Brenda asked. I turned, wondering if I could get away with grabbing her arm and dragging her away.

"I mean, I was considering it, despite everything. Some aspects of it were beginning to look like fun."

"Then what changed your mind?"

"Come on, Brenda," I said. "I'm sure he has his own reasons, and they're none of our business." I took her arm, and tugged at it.

"Stop it," she said, annoyed. "Stop treating me like a child." She glared at me until I let her go. I suppose it would have been unkind to point out that she was a child.