John Varley - Steel Beach

And hey, sure it wasn't a celebration, but what's a holiday without fireworks?

That's the only reason I'd agreed to go, Brenda's promise that I could see the whole thing a safe distance from the madding crowds. The fireworks themselves didn't scare me; I liked fireworks, hated crowds of strangers.

The tube trip almost killed me, though. We'd deliberately decided to start out quite early to avoid the crush on the tubes, but what one genius can think up, another can duplicate, so the trains were already jammed with people who'd had the same idea. Worse, these were people planning to rough it on the surface, away from the eight gigantic temporary domes set up for the show, so they had brought their camping gear. The aisles and overhead racks were piled high with luggage carts, beer coolers, inflatable five-room tents, and 3.4 children per family. It got so bad they started hanging small children from the overhead straps, where they dangled and giggled. Then it got worse. The train stopped taking passengers long before it arrived at Armstrong. My stop was three short of the park, and I soon saw there would be no point in fighting my way out, so I rode it to the end of the line-gaped in horror at the masses already assembled there-was disgorged by an irresistible human tide, then re-boarded and rode it back, empty, to Dionysius Station.

Where I sat down on a bench, my suit and picnic hamper beside me, and just shook for a while, and watched about a dozen human sardine cans rumble by in one direction and a like number return. Then I grabbed my gear and went up the stairs to the surface.

After returning from my frolics with the Alphans, I'd found my suit on the foot of my bed in my cabin. I don't know who brought it there. But I didn't want it anymore, so one Saturday I took it back to the shop, meaning to have them fix the faceplate and sell it on consignment. The salesman took one look at the hole and before I had a chance to explain I was being ushered into the manager's office and he promptly fainted dead away. None of them had ever seen a broken faceplate before. So I shut up, and soon found myself in possession of their top-of-the-line model, plus five years of free air, courtesy Hamilton's Outdoor Outfitters. I made no demands and was asked to sign no disclaimers; they simply wanted me to have it. They're probably still chewing their knuckles, waiting for the lawsuit.

I climbed into this engineering wonder, and that special new-suit aroma went a long way toward calming me down. I'd worried it might stir entirely different associations-how about that cute point-of-view shot of a piece of the faceplate tumbling away?-but instead the low whirs and hums and the pure luxurious feel of the thing did wonders. Too bad they won't let you wear suits in the tube; with this on, I could have handled anything.

Checking the pressure seals on the hamper, I walked into the lock and out onto the surface.

"You been waiting long?" I asked.

"Couple hours," Brenda said.

She was leaning on the side of her rental rover, which she'd driven all the way from a suburb of King City, the nearest place you could rent one. I apologized for being so late, told her of the nightmare in the train, how I wished I'd come with her instead of "saving time" by tubing out.

"Don't worry about it," she said. "I like it out here."

I could already tell that, mostly by looking at her suit. It was a good one, had no rental logo on it, and though in perfect shape, showed signs of use it couldn't have acquired unless she regularly spent time in it. Also by the easy way she stood and moved in it, something most Lunarians never get enough suit time to achieve.

The rover was a good one, too. It was a pick-up model, two seats side by side, a flat bed in back where I tossed my hamper along with her much bigger pile of things. They have a wide wheelbase to compensate for being so top-heavy with the big solar panel above, which swings to constantly present itself to the sun. The sun being almost at the horizon just then, the vehicle was at its most awkward, with the panel hanging out to the right side, perpendicular to the ground. I had to crawl over Brenda's seat to get to mine because the panel blocked the door.

"I forget," I said, as I settled myself in the open seat. "Will we be going into the sun to get there?"

"Nope. South for a while, then we'll have the sun at our backs."

"Good." I hated riding behind the panel. It's not that I didn't trust the autopilot; I just liked to see where I was going.

She told the rover to giddyup, and it did, right along the broad, smooth highway. Which is why we'd chosen Dionysius Station in the first place, because it's right on one of the scarce surface roads on Luna, which is not a place where the wheeled vehicle was ever a primary mode of transport. People move on elevators, escalators, beltways, maglev/tube trains, the occasional hoverbus. Goods go by the same ways, plus pneumomail tubes, linac free-trajectory, and rocket. Recently there'd been something of a fad in wheeled surface rovers, two- and four-wheeled, but they were all-terrain and quite rugged, no roads needed.

The road we were on was a relic from a mining operation abandoned before I was born. From time to time we passed the derelict hulks of ore carriers at the side of the road, mammoth things, not looking much different from the day they'd been stripped and left there. Some economic vagary of the time had made it a better idea to actually smooth out a road surface for them. Then the road had been used for another half century as the conduit between King City and its primary dumping ground. It was still glass-smooth, and quite a novel way to travel.

"This sucker moves right along, doesn't it?" I said.

"It'll reach three hundred kay on the straightaways," Brenda said. "But it's gotta slow way down for the curves, especially ones to the left." That was because the rover's center of gravity was at its worst at sunrise and sunset, with the big panel canted on its side, she explained. Also, the banking of the road was not great, and since we were going to be staying out after dark, she'd had to carry ten batteries, which added a lot to our inertia and could easily make us skid off the road, since the tire traction wasn't as much as she'd prefer. She told me all this with the air of someone who'd done this many times before, someone who knew her machine. I wondered if she could drive it.

I got my answer when we turned off the road, and she asked if I minded. Actually, I did-we're not used to putting our lives in other people's hands, only into the hands of machines-but I said I didn't. And I needn't have worried. She drove with a sure hand, never did anything stupid, never overcontrolled. We took off across the plains toward the rising rim of Delambre, just becoming visible over the horizon.

When we reached the bottom of the slope a Black Maria landed in front of us, blue lights flashing. A cop got out and came over to us. He must have been bored, since he could have used his radio, or simply interrogated our computer.

"You're entering a restricted area, ma'am," he said.

Brenda showed him the pass Liz had given her and he examined it, then her.

"Didn't I see you on the tube?" he asked, and she said he might have, and he said sure, you were on the such-and-such show, now how about that? He said he'd loved it and she said aw, shucks, and by the time he finally let us go he'd been flirting so outrageously I'm convinced we hadn't needed the pass at all. He actually asked for her autograph, and she actually gave it.

"I thought he was going to ask for your phone code," I said, when he'd finally lifted off.

"I thought I was going to give it to him," she said, and grinned at me. "I keep thinking I ought to give guys a try."