John Varley - Steel Beach

Except I now found I had developed a fear of nanobots. Considering what the CC had told me about them, I didn't think it was entirely unfounded.

The other thing that frightened me was even worse. I was afraid to go to sleep.

Not so much sleep in the normal sense. I had slept well enough the night before; better than normal, in fact, considering my exhaustion from the two-day celebrity binge. But the epic infestation of nanobots I was about to experience wreaks havoc on the body and the mind. It's not something you want to be awake for.

Bobbie noticed something was wrong as he took me to the suspension tank. It was all I could do to hold still while the techs shoved the various hoses and cables into the freshly-incised stigmata in my arms and legs and belly. When I was invited to step into the coffin-sized vat of cool blue fluid, I almost lost my composure. I stood there gripping the sides of the vat, knuckles white, with one foot in and the other not wanting to leave the floor.

"Something the matter?" Bobbie asked, quietly. I saw some of his helpers were trying not to stare at me.

"Nothing you could do anything about."

"You want to tell me about it? Let me get these people out of the room."

Did I want to tell him? In a way, I was aching to. I'd never gotten to tell Callie, and the urge to spill it to some body was almost overwhelming.

But this was not the place and certainly not the time, and Bobbie was most definitely not the person. He would simply find a way to incorporate it into the continuing Gothic novel that was The Life Of Robert Darling, with himself the imperiled heroine. I simply had to get through this myself and talk it over with someone later.

And suddenly I knew who that someone would be. So get it over with, Hildy, grit your teeth and step into the tub and let the soothing fluids lull you into a sleep no more dangerous than you've had every night for 36 1/2 thousand nights.

The water closed over my face. I gulped it into my lungs-always a bit unpleasant until all the air is gone-and looked up into the wavering face of my re-creator, unsure when and where I would wake up again.

I found Fox deep in the bowels of the Oregon disneyland. He was engrossed in a blueprint projected on a big horizontal table at the foot of a machine the size of an interplanetary liner, which I later learned was the starter motor for a battery of machines that produced north winds in Oregon. Machines merely elephantine in size swarmed around the partially-assembled behemoth, some with human operators, some working on their own, and there was the usual crowd of blue-uniformed laborers leaning on shovels and perfecting their spitting techniques.

He glanced up as I came closer, looked me up and down, and returned to his work. I'd seen a flicker of interest in his eyes, but no recognition. Then he looked up again, looked harder, and suddenly smiled.

"Hildy? Is that you?"

I stopped and twirled around for him, flashing a few dozen of Crazy Bob's Best Patented Incisors and two of the greatest legs the Master ever designed as my skirt swirled out like a Dresden figurine. He tossed a light pen on the screen and came toward me, took my hand and squeezed it. Then he realized what he was doing, laughed, and hugged me tightly.

"It's been too long," he said. "I saw you on the 'pad the other day." He gestured at me in a way that said he hadn't expected what he was seeing now. I shrugged; the body spoke for itself.

"Reading the Nipple now? I don't believe it."

"You didn't have to read the Nipple to catch your act. Every time I changed the channel, there you were, boring everybody to death."

I made no comment. He had surely been as interested at first as Bobbie and everybody else in Luna, but why bother to explain that to him? And knowing Fox, he wouldn't admit he could be as easily seduced by a sensational story as the rest of his fellow citizens.

"Frankly, I'm glad the idiot's gone. You have no idea the kind of problems David Earth and his merry band cause in my line of work."

"It's Saturday," I said, "but your service said you'd be down here."

"Hell, it's almost Sunday. It's the typical start-up problems. Look, I'll be through here in a few minutes. Why don't you stick around, we can go out for dinner, or breakfast, or something."

"The something sounds interesting."

"Great. If you're thirsty one of these layabouts can scare up a beer for you; give 'em something to do equal to their talents." He turned away and hurried back to his work.

The brief sensation caused by my arrival died away; by that I mean the several dozen men and handful of women who had transferred their gazes from the far distance to my legs now returned to the contemplation of infinity.

A sidewalk supervisor unused to the ways of the construction game might have wondered how anything got done with so many philosophers and so few people with dirty hands in evidence. The answer was simply that Fox and three or four other engineers did all the work that didn't involve lifting and carrying, and the machines did the rest. Though hundreds of cubic miles of stone and soil would be moved and shaped before Oregon was complete, not a spoonful of it would be shifted by the Hod-carriers Union members, though they were so numerous one could almost believe they could accomplish it in a few weeks. No, the shovels they carried were highly polished, ceremonial badges of profession, as un-sullied by dirt as the day they were made. Their chief function was safety. If one of the deep thinkers fell asleep standing up, the shovel handle could be slotted into an inverted pocket on the worker's union suit and sometimes prevented that worthy from falling over. Fox claimed it was the chief cause of on-the-job accidents.

Perhaps I exaggerate. The job guarantee is a civil right basic to our society, and it is a sad fact that a great many Lunarians are suited only for the kind of job machines took over long ago. No matter how much we tinker with genes and eliminate the actually defective, I think we'll always have the slow, the unimaginative, the disinterested, the hopeless. What should we do with them? What we've decided is that everyone who wants to will be given a job and some sort of badge of profession to testify to it, and put to some sort of work four hours a day. If you don't want to work, that's fine, too. No one starves, and air has been free since before I was born.

It didn't used to be that way. Right after the Invasion if you didn't pay your air tax, you could be shown to the airlock without your suit. I like the new way better.

But I'll confess it seems terribly inefficient. I'm ignorant when it comes to economics, but when I bother to wonder about such things it seems there must be a less wasteful way. Then I wonder what these people would do to fill their already-from my viewpoint-empty lives, and I resolve to stop wondering. What's the big problem with it, anyway? I suspect there were people standing around leaning on shovels when the contract for the first pyramid was signed.

Does it sound terribly intolerant for me to say I don't understand how they do it? Perhaps they'd think the same of me, working in a "creative" capacity for an organization I loathe, at a profession with dubious-at best-claims to integrity. Maybe these laborers would think me a whore. Maybe I am a literary whore. But in my defense I can say that journalism, if I may be permitted to use the term, has not been my only job. I have done other things, and at that moment felt strongly that I would be moving on from the Nipple fairly soon.

Most of the men and women around me as I waited for Fox had never held another job. They were not suited for anything else. Most were illits, and the opportunities for meaningful work for such people are few. If they had artistic talent they'd be using it.