John Varley - Steel Beach

"What? Where's that?"

She gave me the faxpad reference. I couldn't believe what I was reading.

"Is that legal?" I asked her.

"Sure. It's a contract between two people, isn't it? Nobody's forced to use it."

"It's an electronic chastity belt, that's what it is."

"Worn by both husband and wife. Not like the brave knight off to the Crusades, getting laid every night while his wife looks for a good locksmith. Good for the goose, good for the gander."

"Good for nobody, if you ask me."

Frankly, I was shocked, and not much shocks me. To each his or her own, that's basic to our society. But ULTRA-Tingle was offering a coded security system whereby each partner had a password, unknown to the other, to lock or unlock his or her partner's sexual response. Without the password, the sexual center of the brain would not be activated, and sex would be about as exciting as long division.

To use it would require giving someone veto power over my own mind. I can't imagine trusting anyone that much. But people are crazy. That's what my job's all about.

"How about over there?" Cricket said.

"Over where? I mean, what about it?" She was headed toward a patch of green, an area that, when completed, would be a pocket park. Trees stood around in pots. There were great rolls of turf stacked against one wall, like a carpet shop.

"It's probably the best spot we'll find."

"For what?"

"Have you forgotten your offer already?" she asked.

To tell the truth, I had. After this many years, it had been made more in jest than anything else. She took my hand and led me onto an unrolled section of turf. It was soft and springy and cool. She reclined and looked up at me.

"Maybe I shouldn't say it, but I'm surprised."

"Well, Hildy, you never really asked, you know?"

I felt sure I had, but maybe she was right. My style is more to kid around, make what used to be known as a pass. Some women don't like that. They'd rather have a direct question.

I stretched out on top of her and we kissed.

We disarranged some of my clothes. She wasn't wearing enough to worry about. Soon we were moving to rhythms it had taken Mother Nature well over a billion years to compose. It was awkward, messy, it lacked flexibility and probably didn't show much imagination. It sure wasn't ULTRA-Tingle. That didn't prevent it from being wonderful.

"Wow," she whispered, as I rolled off her and we lay side by side on the grass. "That was really… obsolete."

"Not nearly as obsolete as it was for me."

We looked at each other and burst out laughing.

After a while, she sat up and glanced at the figures displayed on her wrist.

"Deadline in three hours," she said.

"Me, too." We heard a low hum, looked up, and saw our old friend the hoverlimo headed in our direction. We ran to catch it, leaped over the rubber skirt and landed with seven others, who grumbled and groused and eventually made room for us.

"I am overjoyed to transport you," said the hoverlimo.

"I take that back about the garbage truck," I said.

"Thank you, sir."

This is not a mystery story. The people you will meet along the way are not suspects. The things that happen to them are not clues. I promise not to gather everyone together at the end and dramatically denounce a culprit.

This is not an adventure story. The survival of the universe will not be thrown into jeopardy during the course of it. Some momentous events will occur, and I was present at some of them but, like most of us, I was simply picked up by the tornado of history and deposited, like Judy Garland, in a place I never expected to be. I had little or no hand in the outcome. In fact, this being real life and not an adventure story, it can be said there has been no outcome. Some things will change, and some will remain the same, and most things will simply go on as they were. If I were a writer of adventure fiction, if I were manufacturing myself as the adventure's protagonist, I would certainly have placed myself in the center of more of the plot's turning points. I would have had myself plunging into peril, fighting mighty battles, and saving humanity, or something like that. Instead, many of the most important things I'm going to tell you about happened far from my sight. I just tried to stay alive…

Don't expect me to draw my sword and set things aright. Even if I had a sword and knew how to use it, I seldom saw an unambiguous target, and when I thought I did it was too large and too far away for my puny swordsmanship to have any effect.

This is not a nuts-and-bolts story. Here you will find-among many other howlers-the Hildy Johnson Explanation of Nanobots, their uses, functions, and methods of working. I'm sure much of it is wildly inaccurate, and all of it is surely written about fifty I.Q. points below the layman's level… and so what? If you want a nuts-and-bolts story, there have been many written about the events I will describe. Or you could always read the instruction manual.

Maybe the nanobot stuff could have come out, but I will also deal with the central technological conundrum of our time: that undeniably sentient, great big spooky pile of crystalline gray matter, wonderful humanitarian, your friend and mine, the Central Computer. That was unavoidable, but I will say it once and you'd do well to remember it: I am not a tech. The things I have to say about matters cybernetic should be taken with an asteroid-sized tablet of sodium chloride. Literally thousands of texts have been written concerning how what happened happened, and why it can't happen again, to any degree of complexity you're capable of handling, so I refer the interested reader to them, and good riddance. But I will divulge to you a secret, because if you've come this far with me I can't help but like you: take what those techs say with a grain of salt, too. Nobody knows what's going on with the CC.

So I've told you what kind of story this isn't. Well, what is it?

That's always harder to say. I thought of calling it How I Spent the Bicentennial Year , but where's the sex in that? Where's the headline appeal? I could have called it To The Stars ! That remains to be seen, and it will be my intention throughout not to lie to you.

What I was afraid it was when I began was the world's longest suicide note. It's not: I survived. Damn! I just gave away the ending. But I would hope the more astute of you had already figured that one out.

All I can promise you is that it's a story. Things do happen. But people will behave in unrepentantly illogical ways. Mammoth events will remain resolutely off-stage. Dramatic climaxes will fizzle like wet firecrackers. Questions will go unanswered. An outline of this story would be a sorry thing to behold; any script doctor in the world could instantly suggest dozens of ways to spruce it up. Hey, have you tried outlining your own life lately?

I will be the most illogical character of them all. I will miss opportunities where I could have made a difference, do the wrong thing, and just generally sleepwalk through some critical events in my life. I'm sorry, and I hope you all do better than I have, but I wonder if you will. I will ramble and digress. If Walter couldn't get me to stop doing that, no one could. I will inject bits of my rag-tag personal philosophy; I am an opinionated son of a bitch, or bitch, as the case may be, but when things threaten to get too heavy I will inject some inappropriate humor. Though anything one writes will have a message, I will not try too hard to sell mine to you, partly because I'm far from sure what it is.

But you can relax on one account: this is not a metaphorical story. I will not turn into a giant cockroach, nor will I perish in existential despair. There's even some rock 'em sock 'em action, for those of you who wandered in from the Saturday Matinee. What more could you ask?