John Varley - Steel Beach

How did they make it through the day? Were these the people who were contributing to the alarming rise in suicide the CC reported? Did they get up some morning, pick up the shovel, think the hell with it , and blow their brains out? I resolved to ask the CC, when I started speaking to him again.

It just seemed so bleak to me. I studied one man, a foreman according to one of the many badges pinned to his denims, a Century Man with the gaudy lapel pin proclaiming he had spent one hundred years leaning on that shovel. He was standing near Fox, looking in the general direction of the blueprint table with an expression I'd last seen on an animal that was chewing its cud. Did he have hopes and dreams and fears, or had he used them all up? We've prolonged life to the point that we don't have a clear idea of when it might end, but have failed to provide anything new and interesting to do with that vast vista of years.

Fox put his hand on my shoulder and I realized, with a shock and a perverse sense of reassurance that I must have looked like a cud-chewer myself as I thought my deep, penetrating thoughts. That foreman was probably a fine fellow to sit around and bullshit with. I'll bet he was a terrific joke-teller and could throw one hell of a game of darts. Did we all have to be, to use the traditional expression, rocket scientists? I know a rocket scientist, and a slimier curmudgeon you would not care to meet.

"You're looking good," Fox said.

"Thanks. You all done here for now?"

"Until Monday. I hate to be one of those people married to the job, but if somebody doesn't worry about it this place won't live up to its potential."

"Still the same Fox." I put my arm around his waist as we walked toward his trailer, parked in a jumble of idle machines. He put his hand on my shoulder, but I could tell his thoughts were still back in the blueprints.

"I guess so. But this is going to be the best disney yet, Hildy. Mount Hood is finished; all we need is some snow. It's only one-quarter scale, but it fools the eye from almost any angle. The Columbia's full and almost up to speed. The gorge is going to be magnificent. We're going to have a real salmon run. I've got Douglas Firs twenty meters high. Even when you force-grow 'em, those babies take some time. Deer, grizzlies… it'll be great."

"How long till completion?" We were passing some bear pens. The inmates looked out at us with lazy predators' eyes.

"Five years, if it all goes well. Probably seven, realistically." He held the door to the trailer and followed me inside. It was utilitarian, overflowing with papers. About the only personal touch I saw was an antique slide rule mounted over the gas fireplace. "You want to order something in? There's a good Japanese place that will deliver here. I had to train them; this place is tough to find. Or we could go out if there's something else you'd rather have."

I knew exactly what I wanted, and we wouldn't have to order out for it. I put my arms around him and kissed him in a way that almost made up for the forty years we'd been out of each others' beds. When I drew back for a breath, he was smiling down at me.

"Is this dress a particular favorite?" he asked. He had his hand in the neckline, bunching the fabric.

"Would it do me any good to say yes?"

He slowly shook his head, and ripped it off.

Lovers of fashion should be relieved to note two things: the dress was thirty years old and not one of those that was stylish again, though I had picked it because it flattered the new me. Bobbie would have gagged to see it, but Fox was more direct. And second, I had known Fox would destroy it, though not as a fashion policeman-male or female, Fox was dense about such things. The main thing one needed to know about Fox was that-male or female-he liked to dominate. He liked sex to be rough and urgent and just this side of brutal, and that was exactly what I was in the mood for. As he gave me one of the most thorough rogerings of my life I thanked what gods there be that I had found him during a male period of his life.

Fox was the one I had thought of as I stood nervously on the brink of Change, and it made perfect sense that I did. He and I… actually, for a time it had been she and I, then he and I… we had been lovers for ten years. I don't know just why we broke up, or maybe I've forgotten, but we came out of the parting good friends. Perhaps we simply grew apart, as they say, though that's always sounded like a facile explanation. How much growing do you still have to do when one of you is sixty and the other is fifty-five? But it had been a comfortable time in my life.

The need to see him had been so urgent I had changed my plan to do a little shopping on the Platz, thereby doing my bank balance a big favor. I had rushed home, dressed in the scoop-necked, knee-length satiny black dress with the ballerina skirt that currently lay tattered, wrinkled, and getting very sweaty beneath my naked back, changed my hair color to match the clothes, sprayed make-up on my eyes and mouth and polish on my nails, doused myself with Fox's favorite scent, and was back out the door in three minutes flat. I had taxied to Oregon, worked my feminine magic on the poor boy and within fifteen minutes had my knees in the air and my hands gripping his bare behind, barking like a dog and trying to force him through my body and into the floor beneath us.

Do you see why ULTRA-Tingle is already in financial trouble?

Fox usually had that effect on me. Not always quite so intense, it's true. I was experiencing something politely called hormone shock, or Change mania, but more often known as going cunt crazy. One shouldn't expect to undergo such radical alterations to one's body without a certain upset to the psyche. With me it's always a heightening of sexual hunger. Some people simply get irresponsible. I've got a friend who has to instruct his bank to shut off his line of credit for five days after a Change, or he'd spend every shilling he had.

What I was spending you can't put in a bank, and there's no sense in saving it anyway.

Afterwards, he ordered a mountain of sushi and tempura and when it was delivered, fired up the trailer and took us through a long dark air duct and into Oregon.

Like all disneylands, it was a huge hemispherical bubble, more or less flat on the bottom, the curved roof painted blue. The first ones had been only a kilometer or two across, but as the engineers figured out better ways to support them, the newer ones were growing with no outer limit in sight. Oregon was one of the biggest, along with two others currently under construction: Kansas and Borneo. Fox tried his best not to bore me with statistics; I simply forget them a few minutes after hearing them. Suffice it to say the place was very big.

The floor was mostly rock and dirt shaped into hills and two mountains. The one he'd called Mount Hood was tall and sharply pointed. The other was truncated and looked unfinished.

"That's going to be a volcano," he said. "Or at least a good approximation of an active volcano. There was an eruption in this area in historic times."

"You mean lava and fire and smoke?"

"I wish we could. But the power requirements to melt enough rock for a worthwhile eruption would bust the budget, plus any really good volume of smoke would hurt the trees and wildlife. What it's going to do is vent steam three or four times a day and shoot sparks at night. Should be real pretty. The project manager's trying to convince the money people to fund a yearly ash plume-nothing catastrophic, it actually benefits the trees. And I'm pretty sure we'll be able to mount a modest lava flow every ten or twenty years."

"I wish I could see it better. It's pretty dim in here." The only real light sources were at the scattered tree farms, dots of bright green in the blasted landscape.