John Varley - Steel Beach

There was very little movement. King City, on the surface, looked bombed out, abandoned.

The printer finished its job and I handed the copy to a passing messenger. Walter would call me about it when it suited him. I thought of several things I could do in the meantime, failed to find any enthusiasm for any of them. So I just sat there and stared out over the surface, and presently I was called into the master's presence.

Walter Editor is what is known as a natural.

Not that he's a fanatic about it. He doesn't subscribe to one of those cults that refuse all medical treatment developed since 1860, or 1945, or 2020. He's not impressed with faith healing. He's not a member of Lifespan, those folks who believe it's a sin to live beyond the Biblical threescore and ten, or the Centenarians, who set the number at one hundred. He's just like most of the rest of us, prepared to live forever if medical science can maintain a quality life for him. He'll accept any treatment that will keep him healthy despite a monstrously dissolute life style.

He just doesn't care how he looks.

All the fads in body styling and facial arrangement pass him by. In the twenty years I have known him he has never changed so much as his hair style. He had been born male-or so he once told me-one hundred and twenty-six years ago, and had never Changed.

His somatic development had been frozen in his mid-forties, a time he often described to all who would listen as "the prime of life." As a result, he was paunchy and balding. This suited Walter fine. He felt the editor of a major planetary newspaper ought to be paunchy and balding.

An earlier age would have called Walter Editor a voluptuary. He was a sensualist, a glutton, monstrously self-indulgent. He went through stomachs in two or three years, used up a pair of lungs every decade or so, and needed a new heart more frequently than most people change gaskets on a pressure suit. Every time he exceeded what he called his "fighting weight" by fifty kilos, he'd have seventy kilos removed. Other than that, with Walter what you saw was what he was.

I found him in his usual position, leaning back in his huge chair, big feet propped up on the antique mahogany desk whose surface displayed not one item made after 1880. His face was hidden behind my story. Puffs of lavender smoke rose from behind the pages.

"Sit down, Hildy, sit down," he muttered, turning a page. I sat, and looked out his windows, which had exactly the same view I'd seen from my windows but five meters higher and three hundred degrees wider. I knew there would be three of four minutes while he kept me waiting. It was one of his managerial techniques. He'd read in a book somewhere that an effective boss should keep underlings waiting whenever possible. He spoiled the effect by constantly glancing up at the clock on the wall.

The clock had been made in 1860 and had once graced the wall of a railway station somewhere in Iowa. The office could be described as Dickensian. The furnishings were worth more than I was likely to make in my lifetime. Very few genuine antiquities had ever been brought to Luna. Most of those were in museums. Walter owned much of the rest.

"Junk," he said. "Worthless." He scowled and tossed the flimsy sheets across the room. Or he tried to. Flimsy sheets resist attaining any great speed unless you wad them up first. These fluttered to the floor at his feet.

"Sorry, Walter, but there just wasn't any other-"

"You want to know why I can't use it?"

"No sex."

"There's no sex in it! I send you out to cover a new sex system, and it turns out there's no sex in it. How can that be?"

"Well, there's sex in it, naturally. Just not the right kind. I mean, I could write a story about earthworm sex, or jellyfish sex, but it wouldn't turn anybody on but earthworms and jellyfish."

"Exactly. Why is that, Hildy? Why do they want to turn us into jellyfish?"

I knew all about this particular hobbyhorse, but there was nothing to do but ride it.

"It's like the search for the Holy Grail, or the Philosopher's Stone," I said.

"What's the Philosopher's Stone?"

The question had not come from Walter, but from behind me. I was pretty sure I knew who it was. I turned, and saw Brenda, cub reporter, who for the past two weeks had been my journalistic assistant-pronounced "copy girl."

"Sit down, Brenda," Walter said. "I'll get to you in a minute."

I watched her dither around pulling up a chair, folding herself into it like a collapsible ruler with bony joints sticking out in all directions, surely too many joints for one human being. She was very tall and very thin, like so many of the younger generation. I had been told she was seventeen, out on her first vocational education try-out. She was eager as a puppy and not half as graceful.

She irritated the hell out of me. I'm not sure why. There's the generational thing. You wonder how things can get worse, you think that these kids have to be the rock bottom, then they have children and you see how wrong you were.

At least she could read and write, I'll give her that. But she was so damnably earnest, so horribly eager to please. She made me tired just looking at her. She was a tabula rasa waiting for someone to draw animated cartoons on. Her ignorance of everything outside her particular upper-middle class social stratum and of everything that had happened more than five years ago was still un-plumbed.

She opened the huge purse she always carried around with her and produced a cheroot identical to the one Walter was smoking. She lit up and exhaled a cloud of lavender smoke. Her smoking dated to the day after she met Walter Editor. Her name dated to the day after she met me. Maybe it should have amused or flattered me that she was so obviously trying to emulate her elders; it just made me angry. Adopting the name of a famous fictional reporter had been my idea.

Walter gestured for me to go on. I sighed, and did so.

"I really don't know when it started, or why. But the basic idea was, since sex and reproduction no longer have much to do with each other, why should we have sex with our reproductive organs? The same organs we use for urination, too, for that matter."

"'If it ain't broke, don't fix it,'" Walter said. "That's my philosophy. The old-fashioned system worked for millions of years. Why tamper with it?'

"Actually, Walter, we've already tampered with it quite a bit."

"Not everybody."

"True. But well over eighty percent of females prefer clitoral relocation. The natural arrangement didn't provide enough stimulation during the regular sex act. And just about that many men have had a testicle tuck. They were too damn vulnerable hanging out there where nature put them."

"I haven't had one," he said. I made note of that, in case I ever got into a fight with him.

"Then there's the question of stamina in males," I went on. "Back on Earth, it was the rare male over thirty who could consistently get an erection more than three or four times a day. And it usually didn't last very long. And men didn't have multiple orgasms. They just weren't as sexually capable as women."

"That's horrible," Brenda said. I looked at her; she was genuinely shocked.

"That's an improvement, I'll have to admit," Walter said.

"And there's the entire phenomenon of menstruation," I added.

"What's menstruation?"

We both looked at her. She wasn't joking. Walter and I looked at each other and I could read his thoughts.

"Anyway," I said, "you just pointed out the challenge. Lots of people get altered in one way or another. Some, like you, stay almost natural. Some of the alterations aren't compatible with others. Not all of them involve penetration of one person by another, for instance. What these newsex people are saying is, if we're going to tamper, why not come up with a system that is so much better than the others that everyone will want to be that way? Why should the sensations we associate with 'sexual pleasure' be always and forever the result of friction between mucous membranes? It's the same sort of urge people had about languages back on Earth, back when there were hundreds of languages, or about weights and measures. The metric system caught on, but Esperanto didn't. Today we have a few dozen languages still in use, and more types of sexual orientation than that."