John Varley - Steel Beach

So you've been warned. From here on in, you're on your own.

The tube capsule back to King City was a quarter full. I used the time to try to salvage something from the wasted afternoon. Looking around me, I saw that all my colleagues were busy at the same task. Eyes were rolled up, mouths hung open, here and there a finger twitched. It had to be either a day trip from the Catatonic Academy, or the modern press at work.

Call me old-fashioned. I'm the only reporter I know who still uses his handwriter except to take notes. Cricket was young enough I doubted she'd ever had one installed. As for the rest of them, over the last twenty years I'd watched as one after the other surrendered to the seductions of Direct Interface, until only I was left, plodding along with antique technology that happened to suit me just fine.

Okay, so I lied about the open mouths. Not all D.I. users look like retarded zombies when they interface. But they look asleep, and I've never been comfortable sleeping in public places.

I snapped the fingers of my left hand. I had to do it twice more before the handwriter came on. That worried me; it was getting harder to find people who still knew how to work on handwriters.

Three rows of four colored dots appeared on the heel of my left hand.

By pressing the dots in different combinations with my fingertips I was able to write the story in shorthand, and watch the loops and lines scrawl themselves on a strip of readout skin on my wrist, just where a suicide would slash himself.

There couldn't be that many of us left who knew Gregg. I wondered if I ought to apply for a grant under the Preservation of Vanishing Skills act. Shorthand was certainly useless enough to qualify. It was at least as obsolete as yodeling, and I'd once covered a meeting of the Yodeling Society. While I was at it, maybe I could drum up some interest in the Preservation of the Penis.

(File ***Hildy*next avail.*)(code Unitingle)

(headline to come)

How far do you trust your spouse? Or better yet, how much does your spouse trust you!

That's the question you'll be asking yourself if you subscribe to United Bioengineers' new sex system known as ULTRA-Tingle.

ULTRA-Tingle is the new, improved, up-dated version of UniBio's mega-flop of a few years back, known simple as Tingle. Remember Tingle? Well, don't feel bad. Nobody else does, either. Somewhere, in some remote cavern in this great dusty globe we feel sure there must be someone who converted and stayed that way. Maybe even two of them. Maybe tonight they're Tingling each other. Or maybe one of them has a tingle-ache.

If you are a bona fide Tingler, call this padloid immediately, because you've won a prize! Ten percent off on the cost of your conversion to ULTRA-Tingle. Second prize: a discount on two conversions!

What does ULTRA-Tingle offer the dedicated sexual adventurer? In a word: Security !

Maybe you thought sex was between your legs. It's not. It's in your head, like everything. And that is the miracle of ULTRA-Tingle. Merely by saying the word you can have the great thrill of caponizing your mate. You, too, can be a grinning gelding. Imagine the joys of cerebral castration! Be the first in your sector to re-discover the art of psychic infibulation! Who but UniBio could raise impotence into the realm of integrated circuits, elevate frigidity from aberration to abnegation?

You don't believe me? Here's how it works:

(to come: *insert UniBio faxpad #4985 ref. 6-13.*)

You may ask yourself: Whatever happened to old-fashioned trust? Well, folks, it's obsolete. Just like the penis, which UniBio assures us will soon go the way of the Do-do bird. So those of you who still own and operate a trouser-snake, better start thinking of a place to put it.

No, not there , you fool! That's obsolete, too!

(no thirty)

The vocabulary warning light was blinking wildly on the nail of my index finger. It turned on around paragraph seven, as I had known it would. But it's fun to write that sort of thing, even if you know it'll never make it into print. When I first started this job I would have gone back and worked on it, but now I know it's better to leave something obvious for Walter to mess with, in the hope he'll leave the rest alone.

Okay, so the Pulitzer Prize was safe for another year.

King City grew the way many of the older Lunar settlements had: one bang at a time.

The original enclave had been in a large volcanic bubble several hundred meters below the surface. An artificial sun had been hung near the top, and engineers drilled tunnels in all directions, heaping the rubble on the floor, pulverizing it into soil, turning the bubble into a city park with residential corridors radiating away from it.

Eventually there were too many people for that park, so they drilled a hole and dropped in a medium-sized nuclear bomb. When it cooled, the resulting bubble became Mall Two.

The city fathers were up to Mall Seventeen before new construction methods and changing public tastes halted the string. The first ten malls had been blasted in a line, which meant a long commute from the Old Mall to Mall Ten. They started curving the line, aiming to complete a big oval. Now a King City map had seventeen circles tracing out the letter J, woven together by a thousand tunnels.

My office was in Mall Twelve, level thirty-six, 120 degrees. It's in the editorial offices of The News Nipple , the padloid with the largest circulation in Luna. The door at 120 opens on what is barely more than an elevator lobby wedged between a travel agency and a florist. There's a receptionist, a small waiting room, and a security desk. Behind that are four elevators that go to actual offices, on the Lunar surface.

Location, location, and location, says my cousin Arnie, the real estate broker. The way I figure it, time plays a part in land values, too. The Nipple offices were topside because, when the rag was founded, topside meant cheap. Walter had had money even way back then, but he'd been a cheap son of a bitch since the dawn of time. He got a deal on the seven-story surface structure, and who cared if it leaked? He liked the view.

Now everybody likes views, and the fine old homes in Bedrock are the worst slums in King City. But I suspect one big blow-out could turn the whole city topsy-turvy again.

I had a corner office on the sixth floor. I hadn't done much with it other than to put in a cot and a coffeemaker. I tossed my hat on the cot, slapped the desk terminal until it lighted up, and pressed my palm against a read-out plate. My story was downloaded into the main computer in just under a second. In another second, the printer started to chatter. Walter prefers hard copy. He likes to make big blue marks on it. While I waited I looked out over the city. My home town.

The News Nipple Tower is near the bottom of the J of King City. From it you can see the clusters of other buildings that mark the sub-surface Malls. The sun was still three days from rising. The lights of the city dwindled in the distance and blended in with the hard, unblinking stars overhead.

Almost on the horizon are the huge, pearly domes of King City farms.

It's pretty by night, not so lovely by day. When the sun came up it would bathe every exposed pipe and trash pile and abandoned rover in unsympathetic light; night pulled a curtain over the shameful clutter.

Even the parts that aren't junk aren't all that attractive. Vacuum is useful in many manufacturing processes and walls are of no use for most of them. If something needed to be sheltered from sunlight, a roof was enough.

Loonies don't care about the surface. There's no ecology to preserve, no reason at all to treat it as other than a huge and handy dumping ground. In some places the garbage was heaped to the third story of the exterior buildings. Give us another thousand years and we'll pile the garbage a hundred meters deep from pole to pole.